Azure, Powershell, Automation and Exchange
One of the first questions asked whenever a system or application goes down is “what changed recently”. Ill-planned or unplanned changes are often the underlying cause of failures. And if you live on the Operations side of the IT fence like me, a large portion of your existence is dedicated to mitigating the negative impact of these age accelerating events.
Continue reading “Azure Configuration Management of AWS VMs (Inventory) – Part 1”
Let me begin by stating that I am not a programmer or C# expert. I am a System engineer by trade, who has become proficient in Powershell scripting. When I first began working in IT, about 13 years ago, the first programming language that I tried to learn was Perl. At the beginning of that process, I immediately discovered programming is not for me and this relationship will not work. So I dumped Perl after a few “dates” and never looked back. However, that was then. Now, after having worked with Powershell to create scripts to automate tasks, I have developed a renewed interest in coding.
I attended this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, FL and decided i would provide my reflections on the event. The annual conference provides a plethora of sessions on Microsoft technology offerings and solutions related to Microsoft 365, IoT, containers, DevOps, Team collaboration, Azure services and more. Also, there’s an Expo of various IT vendors; panel discussions on Diversity in IT; and hands on labs to provide IT skill development. It’s a huge event with attendees in all walks of IT from around the world.
Continue reading “MyIgnite – Reflections on Microsoft Ignite 2018”
Azure Ad Connect provides organizations with the ability to synchronize their On-premises users and groups to Azure Active Directory. When synchronizing objects to Azure, administrators have the ability to control which users or groups are synchronized to the cloud. Furthermore, it’s also possible to select which user or group attributes are synchronized. Some organizations may have Security policies that prohibit certain information, such as phone numbers and addresses, from appearing in the cloud. Luckily, attributes can be easily filtered by unchecking the attribute on the AD connector object in Synchronization Service Manager.
Back in April of this year, I passed Azure exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions. To be honest, this was actually my second attempt at the exam. I failed on my first try about three weeks earlier. But who’s counting? All that matters is that I persisted and eventually passed. I’m not mentioning this to be discouraging to anyone intending to take the exam. However, my intention is to provide encouragement if you don’t pass the first time around. No one likes seeing the word “Fail” on the exam printout, but it’s not the end of the world. With that being said, I thought I would write an article outlining the methods I employed to prepare for the test.
If you are an Exchange server administrator, you more than likely spend a fair amount of time searching the Message Tracking logs. The data provided by these logs can be helpful in finding all messages with a particular subject or sent by a certain user during a specific time frame. Of course, there are two ways to search the Message logs: the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) or Exchange Management Shell. Using the GUI is perfectly fine, if that is your preference. However, if you are having to perform searches on a regular basis, the EMS is the more efficient option.
Continue reading “Powershell Function to Get Messages in Exchange”
Do you want to know how to get the mailbox count per database on a particular server? Use the following cmdlet to get that information:
Get-Mailbox -Server servername | Group-Object -Property:database | select Name,Count | FT -AutoSize
Remember to change “servername” to the name of your Primary Mailbox server.
Here’s an example of the command output:
We have very busy work and personal lives, which can easily involve several meetings in the span of one week. Outlook reminders serve an important role in helping to manage scheduled appointments and meetings. Although, it’s not sufficient to have a slot on the calendar for that demo scheduled next week with a software vendor. This is where Reminders come to the rescue of human memory shortcomings. A reminder will popup and say “your demo session with Vendor X starts in 15 minutes”. That’s not what it actually says, but you get the point.
With the expanded role of email in business communication, there is a need for organizations to preserve emails for compliance and security reasons. Email has become the lifeblood of companies, the primary means by which employees communicate with clients, coworkers and vendors. Since electronic messages contain business related data or content, emails often maintain importance that extends months or years into the future. Additionally, many times an Email administrator will be faced with the task of gathering and producing messages for legal cases. For these reasons, message Archiving is a vital process.
In this post, I will show how to view a delivery for a Sent Item. This report, which can be seen from Outlook and OWA, will provide information on the status of an email such as: when the message was submitted, delivered and if it was read.
DaRaw Techie 