When you need to find information on how to do something or how something works, what's your first step?

• Do you go to the Exchange Server TechNet Library and follow the table of contents (TOC - pictured right) to the node you need?
• Do you use search? When you use search, do you go for a help topic in the product documentation on TechNet or do you go for the community blog, forum, etc? If you don't go for the product documentation, why is that?

When you look at the product documentation in TechNet, how important is the TOC to you? Do you use it? If you do, how does it help you to find the information you need?

If you arrive at a topic on TechNet from a search query, and that topic doesn't have the information you're looking for, what do you do next?

• Do you click around in the TOC
• Use the More Resources panel on the right-hand side of the page
• Back out to the search query and try another search result?

How long do you stay in the documentation looking for the right answer before you back out to the search query?

• Immediately
• After clicking around a bit
• Never (meaning you then use the TOC to find the relevant topic)?

We do have anonymous, generalized, site usage information that gives us some insight into some of these questions, but I'm really interested in how you find content, whether you find the TOC useful, and how often you use it. Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks!

The top part of the banner includes common commands that should make your life easier if you're brand new to the shell. Commands to discover cmdlets, find help, read the Exchange Team blog, and so on. The bottom part of the banner includes a "Tip of the Day". Tips are usually short and contain examples of command syntax or how to take a complex task and turn it into a simple one-liner.

While we've included the banner with both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010, we've never actually received any feedback about whether people actually like it, use it, or if it even just gets in their way. So, this is your opportunity to let us (well, us being me since I own this bit of the product :) know whether you find it valuable. What can we do to improve either the top banner or the Tip of the Day, or both? Are there other often-used command examples that should be displayed in the top banner (keeping in mind that if we add something, an existing command likely needs to go due to space issues)? Are the commands in the Tip of the Day relevant to you? What types of tips do you wish you would see more of?  Most importantly, have you ever discovered a command or way to do something via a Tip of the Day that you didn't know before? I want to know!

Please use the comments to leave any feedback you might have. Alternately, you can use the "Email Blog Author" link to the right to send me a message directly.

If you work with the Exchange Management Shell, you’re probably aware that some parameters on cmdlets can accept multiple values. These parameters are associated with “multivalued properties". If you’ve worked with multivalued properties, you’re probably also aware that it’s very easy to accidentally overwrite these properties when you attempt to add a value to them. That’s because the behavior in the shell is generally to overwrite the existing value in a property, rather than add to it. For example, assume that you have a distribution group, and you’ve configured David, Chris, and Susan to be able to manage them:

Get-DistributionGroup Sales | Format-List ManagedBy

ManagedBy : {Contoso.com/Users/david, Contoso.com/Users/susan, Contoso.com/Users/chris}

And now you want to allow a fourth user, Gary, to manage the distribution list. So you go and run the following command:

Set-DistributionGroup Sales -ManagedBy Gary

To your dismay, this is what you see when you re-run the Get-DistributionGroup cmdlet from above:

ManagedBy : {Contoso.com/Users/gary}

When you ran the Set-DistributionGroup cmdlet, the value that you specified with the ManagedBy parameter overwrote the existing value of that property. You probably didn’t want to do that. Previously there was a way to get around this by storing values in a temporary variable, adding a value to that, and then hefting all of that back to the actual property (see Modifying Multivalued Properties for all the gory details). Removing values from a multivalued property was just as cumbersome.

In Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1, however, there’s a much easier way to add and remove values from a multivalued property. With this new syntax, you simply specify the syntax, along with the value or values to add or remove to or from the property, as a value on the parameter when you run the cmdlet. Here’s the new syntax:

To add a value:

@{Add="<value1>", "<value2>", "<value3>"}

To remove a value:

@{Remove="<value1>", "<value2>", "<value3>"}

The syntax is then specified as a parameter value on a cmdlet:

Set-SomeCmdlet -Parameter @{Add="<value1>", "<value2>", "<value3>"}

If we use the example with the distribution above again and want to add Gary, we would use the following command:

Set-DistributionGroup Sales -ManagedBy @{Add="Gary"}

Now when you run the following command again:

Get-DistributionGroup Sales | Format-List ManagedBy 

Here’s what you’ll see:

ManagedBy : {Contoso.com/Users/david, Contoso.com/Users/gary, Contoso.com/Users/susan, Contoso.com/Users/chris}

As you can see, Gary’s been added to the ManagedBy property and the other users remain. Now, let’s assume you want to remove David from the ManagedBy property and add Gerald at the same time. You can combine Add and Remove operations in the same command by separating the Add and Remove commands with a semi-colon. Here’s the syntax to use:

@{Add="<value1>", "<value2>"; Remove="<value1>", "<value2>"}

So to remove David and add Gerald at the same time, you’d use the following command:

Set-DistributionGroup Sales -ManagedBy @{Remove="David"; Add="Gerald"}

When you run the following command:

Get-DistributionGroup Sales | Format-List ManagedBy 

You’ll see that David has been removed from the property and Gerald has been added.

Hopefully you’ll agree that this new syntax makes it much simpler to manage multi-valued properties. Of course, you can continue to replace all the values stored in a multi-valued property by assigning new values directly.

If you're coming from Exchange 2007 or Exchange 2003, see these topics for information on how permissions between Exchange 2010 and those versions are handled:

Understanding Permissions Coexistence with Exchange 2003
Understanding Permissions Coexistence with Exchange 2007

As always, if you want to go beyond what we've provided out of the box, you can read all about advanced permissions extensibility available with Exchange 2010 SP1 in Understanding Role Based Access Control.

I'm always looking for feedback on RBAC content so please send me a message if you have any suggestions or comments. Don't forget that you can always send feedback via the feedback link in the top right-hand corner of any topic. We look at every piece of feedback we receive.

David.

 Have fun!

Exchange 2010 is available now for download. We've worked for two and a half years to create the most advanced e-mail system available. There are dozens of new features in every area of the product - and entirely new feature areas that are just plain cool - mailbox, high availability and resiliency, compliance, permissions, end-user self-management, distribution group self-management...the list can go on and on.

 Go to the Exchange 2010 download page and grab the beta bits now. It's a 360 day evaluation. There are several installation prerequisites you'll need to install first. You can find more information about those prereqs on the Exchange 2010 Prerequisites page.

You can learn about all the new features of Exchange 2010 on the What's New page.

Finally, check out the documentation we've put together for you. It's a beta, so content is still being written. Please make use of the feedback button and tell us what you think of the docs. The beta is as much about getting the documentation right as it is about getting the code right. We need your feedback!

Over the next while I'll be posting more about Exchange 2010 in general but specifically about my feature areas - Role Based Access Control - the new, highly flexible and extremely powerful permissions model in Exchange 2010, and the Exchange Management Shell - the command line interface first introduced in Exchange 2007. We've made some pretty interesting changes to the shell infrastructure that you should find interesting.

Now get going and get downloading! :)

provides a slick front-end to the Live Search service. When you open the app, it tries to determine your location automatically. For me its consistently located me to within a block or two without having to turn on GPS. You can then select from a bunch of different options – Movies, Gas Prices, Traffic, etc. Clicking on an icon brings up search results based on your location. I find the movies really useful given that we practically live in movie theatres. Clicking on Movies opens up a page that has two tabs, one that lists the theatres in your area, the other that shows all of the movies playing. I use the theatre tab which lets me browse through each location and pick what movie i want to see. Show times, length, rating and reviews are all shown.

While you’re in the context of a particular entry you can perform a location based search on that entry. So, for example you can choose a movie theatre to go to and then search for restaurants around that location to find a place to go for dinner. Nifty.

In addition to the options on the main page, you can also click on Categories to view several dozen different categories from Restaurants to Arts and Entertainment and Fitness. As with movies, you can drill down into the details of each entry and perform related searches, bring up phone numbers, or get directions from your location to the place you want to go via turn-by-turn GPS (and grab traffic info while you’re at it).

If you don’t want to navigate through menus to find what you want, you can also click on Speak and say what you’re looking for. The client has surprisingly good voice recognition. Most of the time it goes immediately to a search for the term I want but if it needs to it’ll display a list of possible choices to choose from.

Live Search for Windows Mobile is available in the US, the UK, France and Italy. If you don’t have a supported device or you aren’t in a location that is currently covered by Live Search Mobile, you can always use the mobile version of the online Live Search service at m.live.com.

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KC Lemson and Jim Lucey from the Exchange team provided an introductory look at “Exchange 14” (E14) today in a post and video on the Exchange Team blog. This is the first look at E14 that we’ve provided to the public. E14 is the first release of the product that embraces not only on-premises, which are the traditional deployments that Exchange is known for – physical deployments of Exchange servers in organizations, but also embraces services - which offers Exchange over the internet as a web application. The post talks a bit about our Exchange Labs service that we’re currently testing with our Live@EDU customers.

In the video, Jim walks you through the new web interface that allows you to access everything you’d expect – e-mail, calendar, and so on. While it’s commonplace in the enterprise now, the collaborative features of Exchange becoming available to educational institutions is significant. KC is right – why sit outside the prof’s office for hours for a few minutes of face time when you can schedule an appointment over e-mail? Obviously that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Jim then gives you a peek at the new web options and administration interface for users and administrators. Individual users can perform self management of their own account (want to create your own distribution group or update your personal info? Go for it!) while administrators can manage mailboxes, contacts, etc. Of course, Outlook is there as is Windows Mobile and ActiveSync. And Windows PowerShell will naturally be part of the administration model too.

We have a lot more in store for you in this release of Exchange. More videos will be posted over time giving you more peeks at what’s coming. Watch the videos as they come out and be sure to send in feedback on the Exchange Team blog with what you think of this new version.

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• Use the Exchange Management Shell to manage Exchange 2007
• Enable the Anti-spam Agent in a single server
• Create new storage groups and mailbox databases
• Configure Exchange 2007 to accept multiple e-mail domains and associated e-mail address policies
• Install Exchange 2007 pre-requisites on Windows Server 2008

More videos will be posted in the future on a variety of topics so check back regularly.