I would try to keep it as active as possible hence forth ( I know this was the same promise which I had made in my last blog too)

Well, recently I was working on a case where msExchDelegateListLink  attribute was causing some problem to the end users.

First let's see what is this attribute used for ::Well this feature is used when we do Automapping.

Have we ever thought that as soon as you give full mailbox permission for USER B on USER A's mailbox, how does the USER B sees the USERA's Mailbox in the outlook ??

Ranjit had written a good Blog about the same https://theucguy.net/auto-mapping-mailboxes-with-full-access/

Well think about this scenario now

USER A was given Full Mailbox Permission for USER A :(

Post that they were seeing User A as AlternativeMailbox while doing the TestAutoconfig. I would say expected. Now even after removing the FULL mailbox Permission for USER A we were still seeing it :: Not Expected at all

What was this Breaking ??

This was breaking their search while doing the search they were getting two results one for the Original Mailbox and the other for the AlternativeMailbox (especially for TASKS).

I actually thought it might be because of the AD replication. Looks like I was proved wrong again on this one.:(

When we were digging through this scenario I was able to find Jim Martin's Brilliant Blog which talked about autoD may fail https://blogs.technet.com/b/tips_from_the_inside/archive/2012/01/11/autodiscover-fails-for-one-or-more-users.aspx

Then we looked at the msExchDelegateListLink  and we found that the user was present. Now it was challenging for removing only the Self Account.

After digging into a lot of Scripting, we were able to find the solution and implement the same.

This was a two step procedure.

Step 1 was to find out all the users who had the msExchDelegateListLink  attribute and then export the same.

    Get-ADUser -Properties msExchDelegateListBL,msExchDelegateListLink -LDAPFilter "(msExchDelegateListBL=*)" | Select @{n='Distinguishedname';e={$_.distinguishedname}},@{n= 'alternate';e={$_.msExchDelegateListLink}} | Export-csv userlist.csv –notypeinformation –noclobber

 Step 2 was to remove the self permission

import-csv "userlist.csv" | % {get-aduser -identity $_.distinguishedname | set-aduser -remove @{msExchDelegateListlink=$_.distinguishedname}}

-----

Written by Naveen Vasudevan

Did I Just say Friend :) He is our PFE Akshay

Well I talked about the cmdletextension agents with him and I also liked the Idea

Then we had a great discussion about the same and then we sat in our labs to see if this is really possible.

Eureka we were able to achieve the same.

Before We talk about how we achieved it, please go through the following article about cmdletextensionagents https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335054(v=exchg.150).aspx

Now lets see how we did we do it

We wanted to have the Pager attribute value to be populated as the additional email address

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<Configuration version="1.0">

<Feature Name="MailboxProvisioning" Cmdlets="enable-mailbox">

  <ApiCall Name="OnComplete">

   if($succeeded)    {

$user = (Get-User $provisioningHandler.UserSpecifiedParameters["Identity"]).distinguishedName

set-mailbox -identity $user -emailaddresspolicyenabled $false

$a=get-mailbox $user | Get-User | select pager

write-host $a

write-host $a.pager

$b=$a.Pager+ "@wingtiptoys.com"

$c=Get-Mailbox $user

$c.EmailAddresses+="$b"

Set-Mailbox -identity $user -EmailAddresses $c.EmailAddresses

   }

  </ApiCall>

</Feature>

</Configuration>

I would strongly recommend you to go ahead look at the https://www.ehloworld.com/194 blog about where and how to enable which scripting agent.

Thanks a lot Akshay.

Naveen Vasudevan

Recently I worked on a scenario , where we had to restore the MESO objects and have the PF link back to the associated MESO object.  We found that the Hierarchy was moved from One Admin Group to another Group after the MESO objects were removed. We had to restore the MESO Object from the AD backup : so, we needed an Auth Restore.

After the Auth Restore we found that the Homemdb object was pointing towards the OLD TLH. We tried to use ADMODIFY.net , a wonderful tool which has helped us a lot in the past,  but unfortunately it does not work for PF L

Of course, we could have moved back the Hierarchy to the OLD location and probably we could have fixed the Problem. But how about using Powershell to do the magic for us?

So can the Exchange Powershell cmdlets do this magic ? Unfortunately No. So we had to use the AD Module, and it did come to our rescue beautifully.

To List the Proxyaddresses,ShowinAddressbook and MsexchHideFromAddresslist of the PF Objects we ran the command

Get-ADObject -LDAPFilter "(objectClass=publicFolder)" -properties showInAddressBook,proxyAddresses,msExchHideFromAddressList

We did get the Report of the Public Folders and this also showed a lot of PF's Missing the Showinaddressbook attribute.

So we had two tasks :

#1 set the homemdb to point to the new TLH.

#2 set the ShowInaddressbook attribute.

For #1 : We copied the DN value of the TLH and ran the following command

Get-ADObject -LDAPFilter "(objectClass=publicFolder)" | Set-ADObject -add @{homemdb=<DN of the TLH which was copied earlier>}

For #2 : This one was little bit tricky as we had a Multi valued property and we had two values - the DN of the Default GAL and the DN of the Public Folders Address List. So we used the array concept and ran the below commands to achieve the result

$addr = @()
$addr += "DN of the GAL"
$addr += "DN of PF List"

Get-ADObject -LDAPFilter "(objectClass=publicFolder)" | Set-ADObject -replace@{showInAddressBook = $addr}

One thing to note here is that , in #1 we had used “-add” as we needed the new entry ; and in #2 we had used “-replace” as we had to modify.

Until next time, have fun with powershell :)

 A very Special Thanks To Senthil Kumar S SEE in the Exchange Team for his Ideas on this.

Recently, my colleague Ajay was troubleshooting EWS issue and had multiple huge IIS logs from different servers. 

We had tried to open the logs using a lot of large file viewer tools but no luck in opening them :(

Then we thought, Why not use the power of select-string to find out all the /EWS requests?  So, here it is :

In Powershell cmd  prompt, please navigate to the location where you have saved the IIS logs, and
run the below command : 



Get-Content ".\*log" | ? { ($_ | Select-String "/ews")}  



The above command would give us all the EWS requests.

To filter this to a particular user name, use the below command:

Get-Content ".\*log" | ? { ($_ | Select-String "/ews") -and ($_ | Select-String "Useralias")}  

Some more options that will be more commonly required : 

For Outlook Web Access : Replace EWS with OWA 

For EAS : Replace EWS with Microsoft-server-activesync 

For ECP : Replace EWS with ECP

To find out the count of the EWS request we can go ahead and run the below command

(Get-Content ".\*log" | ? { ($_ | Select-String "/ews") -and ($_ | Select-String "Useralias")}).count

 

-Written By  Naveen  Vasudevan Technical Lead

With more hybrid setups which are coming up these days we would certainly want seamless experience in both On-prem Servers and the O365
servers.

We did get a requirement stating that we need to have few users who would be migrating to cloud have the same recipient rate limit as in
cloud.

Creating the recipient rate limit:

Where does the throttling policy get saved?

The throttling policy gets saved in the AD under the following location

CN=Global Settings,CN=EMAIL,CN=MicrosoftExchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=Contoso,DC=com

Where does the recipient rate limit gets stored on the policy?

Lets check where is 10 which we had specified on the New-throttlingpolicy

Now we need to add the users to throttling policy. We can run the set-mailbox to do so. In the below example I am adding
test_50 user to throttling policy mstest which we had created earlier.

We can add this by running set-mailbox test_50 -throttlingpolicy mstest.

 We can check if the throttlingpolicy has been applied to the user mailbox by running

get-mailbox test_50 | fl throttlingpolicy

Now what does this mean? This means that after the 10^th email what happens? Let us see the end users screen.

This means that the user can send emails to 10 recipient and as soon as the user adds the 11^th recipient or more
you would see the error stating “Thismessage can’t be send. You’ve reached the limit of the number messages that can
be sent in a 24-hour period”.

Two conditions when the mailbox can again send another set of the messages.

1. 
   If the 24 hours have been completed.
2. 
   If we go ahead and restart the throttling
   service on the mailbox server where the mailbox is located.

How does this work actually?

 Before we start to know how it works let us talk some terms which would be used in the workflow:

 Token: The token is the number of recipients which has been already processed.

Token Bucket Map: This is table where the guids of the mailbox are kept, this is obtained during the Start of Throttling service.

When the Service starts it maintains the Token Bucket Map in the memory.  If the user has never logged in then there is nothing in the Bucket map so throttling
service would add this as a new table in the Bucket Map.

 When the User Submits the mail, then the throttling service checks the Bucket Map with a request called Obtain token.

 If the below condition is true, then the mail would be submitted or else it would stuck.

 Obtain Token + Token bucket map <= Recipientratelimit

Let’s do the calculation why we are not ble to send an email.

 Recipientratelimit=10

First email was sent with 6 recipients, so the Token Bucket map would be 6.

The email which failed to be sent has 7 recipients, so the Obtain Token count would be 7.

 Let us do the above calculation

 6+7 =13 > 10 hence the mail can’t be sent.

A special thanks to Escalation Engineer Shashi to look into the Code and help me understand the concept of the
throttling policy.

Naveen Vasudevan

Some other thoughts came too in this Can I customize my Foreground ?

How do I push this to all the PowerShell Users in my Domain?

Well I was finally able to go ahead and figure this out :)

To do this we need to have a to add Profile.ps1 in the following location

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\

Now how do we do this ?

Well I thought of using the Group Policy to do this

 Now after you have selected the files we need to add two things

1. Source File(s): Add the UNC path of the file.

2. Destination File : C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Profile.ps1

The most important thing is what do we have in the Profile.ps1

 Here is an Example where I have added the Domain\alias in the Title Bar and have started the Transcript in the session. 

$c=(get-WmiObject -Class Win32_UserAccount -Filter "Name='$env:username' and Domain='$env:userdomain'").Caption >>>>>  Here is where I get the Domain Name and User Name who has logged in
$host.UI.RAWUI.Windowtitle= "$c"
Set-ExecutionPolicy remotesigned -confirm:$false
start-transcript -path ("$env:temp"+ (get-date -format ddmmyyHHmm)+".txt") -force  -noclobber >>>>>>>>> Here is where I have started the transcript

How do we see the PowerShell before we went ahead and added the Profile.Ps1

Now Let us see the PowerShell after we pushed the Profile.ps1 using the group policy

As we can see the domain name and the transcript already started with the PowerShell window.

Does this work with Exchange or Any other PowerShell : Yes if the Profile path is C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Profile.ps1.

I would be working on the adding the transcript file to an UNC path so that it is easier for the administrators to go ahead and manage the files.

-Written By  Naveen  Vasudevan

mailbox in the specified region uses. The default value is the time zone setting on the server.

I was interested to understand how it is stored

After doing a lot of research on this, I was able to Figure it out :

The language that you select will determine the date and time settings in the Date and Time

Formats section.

The default client  language setting applies to individual Outlook Web Access virtual

directories.

The default client language is the client language that is used by  Outlook
Web Access unless the user uses Regional Settings in Outlook Web Access

to change the language and time zone. The default value for this setting is 0.

This means the default client language is not defined. If the default client

language is not defined, users will be prompted to choose a language and time

zone the first time that they log on to Outlook Web Access. If the default client
language value is defined, users will not be prompted to choose a language
and the Outlook Web Access time zone will use the time zone of the Client
Access server. Defining the default client language causes the default folders
to be renamed based on the specified language. Users can change the client
language and time zone by using Regional Settings in Outlook Web Access,and
can rename the default folders after they log on.

The default value for Language setting is 0, i.e. not defined resulting in users being

prompted to choose a language the first time that they sign in to Outlook Web App.

Administrators can specify the default language, so that the users are not

prompted to select Language as shown above. The Default language for OWA can be

set using the following command.

Set-OWAVirtualDirectory “owa(Default Web Site)” -DefaultClientLanguage <Languagecode>

If we have kept the defaultclienlanguage to any language for example 1033 which is english

(US https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997435.aspx)

then I do not get the option to change the time zone when I login to the first time OWA with a new user.

Then I went ahead and ran the command : Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration –timezone to pacific standard time
and then I looked at the user settings in OWA (under the options >all options and regional) I was able to see pacific, then I went

ahead and changed it to Indian Standard Time in OWA and then I ran the

get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration for that user then I was able to see Indian Standard Time..

Articles which you may like to read :

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351103.aspx

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.exchange.data.storage.management.mailboxregionalconfiguration.aspx

Also look at the class mentioned on the MSDN

 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.exchange.data.storage.management.mailboxregionalconfiguration.mailboxregionalconfiguration

 Written by:

Naveen Vasudevan, Technical Lead, Enterprise Communications Services, Microsoft 

Have fun with Powershell and exchange and LYNC :)

It took some time but I was able to get it working.

SCRIPT :

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

foreach($mailbox in Get-MailboxStatistics -Database RDB)
{New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SourceDatabase RDB -SourceStoreMailbox
$mailbox.DisplayName -TargetMailbox $mailbox.DisplayName}

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

NOTE: In the above example RDB is the name of the Recovery Database

PLEASE CHECK FOR THE SPACES when you copy paste the
script.

in Office Communication 2007 R2.

The Next Statement he said was the Shock :) We do not have a PowerShell Module for Office Communication

Server 2007.

I said wow. Then When checked with him he gave me a Hint stating we may be able to achieve this using WMI.

I should Thank Prashant now at least :)  for the brilliant idea of WMI.

Here is how you do this.

I wanted user to enter the SIP address so that it is easy for us to change and keep a Track of the changes :)

$b=read-host

get-wmiobject -Class
MSFT_SIPESUserSetting | Where-Object {$_.PrimaryURI -like $b} | %
{$_.meetingpolicy =
"CN={XXXXXXXXXXXXXX},CN=Policies,CN=RTC
Service,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=corp,DC=Contoso,DC=com";
$_.put() | out-null}

In the above example we have to specify the $b as sip:alias@contoso.com

We need to query the AD to find out the DN of the Meeting Policy to set.

Written by:

Naveen Vasudevan, Technical Lead, Enterprise Communications Services, Microsoft 

Have fun with Powershell and exchange and LYNC :)

that We were unable to open the Exchange Management Shell, Exchange Management Console

we were missing the Powershell Logs from the event viewer

Written by:

Naveen Vasudevan, Technical Lead, Enterprise Communications Services, Microsoft 

Have fun with Powershell and exchange :)