Exchange Management Shell

Windows Power Shell, the scripting language introduced by Microsoft last year, is a welcome addition to the admin toolbox. Command line tools experienced a decade of neglect as GUI adminstrative tools took over the landscape. "In the beginning.. " is an entertaining yarn by Neal Stephenson about the history of the much maligned command line.

The Exchange 2007 team adopted an approach that lets us have our cake and eat it too. We now have the GUI Exchange Management Console for convenience that always shows the equivalent Exchange Management Shell cmdlets that are being used to accomplish each operation.

Get-Mailbox is an Exchange Shell cmdlet that can locate one or more mailboxes and report on various properties.

Use the Select-Object cmdlet to display just the properties you're interested in as opposed to the default display properties. For example, showing only the warning and send limits is often desired.

You could then use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet to change the quota.

This is all fine except you may be wondering what the big deal is all about. An administrator could just as easily use the Exchange Management Console and do the same thing with less effort. The real power of Power Shell (pardon the pun) is the combination of assorted cmdlets to automate repetitive tasks.

Let's suppose we want to increase the ProhibitSendQuota by 50MB for all users that have current ProhibitSendQuota greater than or equal to 100MB. This could potentially be a large task to do manually (checking every user and upgrading them), however it's quick and easy using Exchange Shell.

Note that I used the $1st shell variable to hold the intermediate results so I could check the list of mailboxes obtained using the Where-Object cmdlet before actually running the foreach loop that bumps the send quota limits.

Saving the list in a variable also lets us check things again at the end using $1stGet-Mailbox to make sure everything worked as expected.

Exchange Shell opens up many new possibilities for managing Exchange Server and simplifies the administration of large number of users.

See the Using the Exchange Management Shell in TechNet for an introduction and The Exchange 2007 Wiki for more tips and examples.