Category: Tips and Tricks

PowerShell thought process

One important aspect of leveraging PowerShell is to adjust your mindset. Listed are some topics to consider: Automate: Create scripts, functions, and modules to automate manual tasks. If you function up routine tasks, you and others can quickly and easily complete work duties more efficiently. Delegate: Once the functions and modules are built and deployed,

No one received the certificate expiration notification!

Exchange Certificates Prior to Exchange Server 2013, the Exchange application did not automatically notify administrators of a pending upcoming certificate expiring. One of the issues we administrators run into is expiring certificates. If the Exchange environment has a certificate that expires, then typically, trusted access via clients is interrupted. The good news is, you should ask

Protect OU’s from accidental deletion

Here is a quick and easy one line PowerShell script to set all of the Organizational Units (OU's) in your Active Directory (AD) to protect from accidental deletion. I know others have posted similar information, but it never hurts to raise awareness of this setting. And also, since I run into many customers that do

cmdlet: Get-InboxRule

Q: Is there a way to get a list of Inbox rules from a mailbox? A: Yes. The Get-InboxRule is available both on premises and online versions of Exchange. This cmdlet allows you to review all or specific Inbox rules on an end user’s mailbox. Get-InboxRule -Mailbox Joe@Contoso.com This example retrieves all Inbox rules for the

Load balancer design options

As I visit companies, I run into many that are doing different designs when it comes to leveraging load balancers. I’m not a network engineer and there is just way too much information to present in one article, but here are some thoughts at a high level design I’d like to share. TCP ports 80/443. In Exchange 2013, we

Opening multiple files in ISE

Q: Is there a way to open a bunch of files in ISE quickly? A: Yes. Get-ChildItem -Path C:\MyWork -Filter My*.ps1 | ForEach-Object {ise $_.FullName} In this case, any files that start with ‘My’, under the ‘c:\MyWork’ folder, will run through the foreach-object loop and open those files. You can change the path or change the filter options to

To archive or not to archive…

This article is about choice and how ‘it depends’ for different environments. The philosophical question of how a roll of toilet paper should be placed on the roller; have the paper dispense over the top of the roll, or from below. Every version of Exchange introduces new paradigms and options that can have impact on

New Snipping tool

Just got my notification that Windows 10 is implementing a new snipping tool. The snipping tool was introduced in Windows Vista and is now being updated with the ‘Snip & Sketch’. You can download the toolset from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/snip-sketch/9mz95kl8mr0l#activetab=pivot:overviewtab

FieldNote: Secure password in file?

Sometimes you must store a password for an account in a PowerShell script file. One option is to leverage the ConvertTo-SecureStringcmdlet. By running this cmdlet on a machine, with a specific password, a secure string is generated. You put that value into your file, and then you can run a ConvertFrom-SecureSting to run the script securely. However, I