Category: PowerShell

So a lot of environments are making the jump to Exchange 2013/2016 away from 2007/2010. From a management point of view the largest change is the move away from a GUI Management option to web-based and PowerShell management. One of the tools missing is the Message Tracking tool, which in a basic form is available on the Web Console but is difficult to use for external mail items so then we move onto PowerShell which gives us what we want but not in the format that is the easiest to understand.

You can use things like FormatList or FormatTable to make things a little prettier but a nicer trick I learned recently was to use Out-GridView which formats things into a new window which we can apply filters to. An example of Get-MessageTrackingLog piped to GridView is below (see the image for the example output)

Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize Unlimited -Start "November 10 2016" -End "November 30 2016" -Recipient "[email protected]" | Out-GridView

Using the GridView we can easily apply filters to further narrow down our search easier.

Quick one today.  By default, when creating a room resource mailbox, Exchange will grant default permissions of AvailabilityOnly for any user (default), if you are after people knowing who has booked a room or resource then you can adjust the permissions to Reviewer. The quickest way to do this is via PowerShell, you can use the following cmdlet;

Add-MailboxFolderPermission -Identity MeetingRoom2:\Calendar -user "Staff - All Staff" -AccessRight Reviewer

I am using a group (called Staff – All Staff) in the above that does not have any permissions already applied to that mailbox calendar. If the user or group already has some kind of permission, you will need to use Set-MailboxFolderPermissions instead of Add-MailboxFolderPermissions.

If you have multiple Resource Mailboxes, you can pipe a Get-Mailbox to hit them all at once like so;

$rooms = Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox
$rooms | %{Add-MailboxFolderPermission $_":\Calendar" -User "Staff - All Staff" -AccessRights Reviewer}

Hope that helps.

Every so often I get a request to allow people to view someone else’s calendar. Usually I just tell that person to go and ask whom ever the calendar belongs to, to give them permission. This isn’t always possible though as on a few occasions where I’ve had to give access because that other person is away.

With mailboxes you can use the management tools to give access rights, but what if I just want to give the, access to a calendar or tasks for example. This is where the exchange PowerShell console comes in. I can give a user Permission to a particular object. So for example I wanted to give user1 permission to edit manager 1’s calendar, I would do the following

Add-MailboxFolderPermission -identity manager1:\Calendar
-user user1 -accessrights Editor

You can use the following on all of the Outlook Exchanged based folders like so replacing <User> with the identity of the mailbox with the object you want to modify the permissions of and <delegate_user> with the username of the person of who you are giving permission to;

Add-MailboxFolderPermission <User>:\Calendar -User <delegate_user> -AccessRights Editor
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <User>:\Tasks -User <delegate_user> -AccessRights None
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <User>:\Inbox -User <delegate_user> -AccessRights None
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <User>:\Contacts -User <delegate_user> -AccessRights None
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <User>:\Notes -User <delegate_user> -AccessRights None
Add-MailboxFolderPermission <User>:\Journal -User <delegate_user> -AccessRights None

You can also quickly check who has access to an object (like a calendar) by using the following cmdlet, again replacing <user> with the identity of the mailbox;

get-mailboxfolderpermission -identity <user>:\Calendar

Hope that helps someone.