Exchange Mailbox Auditing with Powershell

Some time ago I wrote a script and GUI for performing security audits of Exchange mailbox and calendar rights in an environment. This script was far more popular than I anticipated and, I’m ashamed to say, was rather poorly written by my current Powershell standards. There is an obvious need to simplify the extraction of mailbox permissions or my old script would not still be so popular. So I’ve started to revisit my old code for this project in hopes of remaking it with my PowerShell reporting engine. The first step in this process is to pull out the several bits of code that do the actual rights/permissions extraction. I think I’ve finally got this part done and see no reason not to release this mini-library of functions first.

Lync UCS Contacts Reporting with Powershell

By default a Lync enabled account within a Lync/Exchange 2013 environment will be enabled for UCS (Unified Contact Store). This means that the Lync contacts get saved in the Lync user’s mailbox and not the Lync database. In order to get a list of the contacts associated with these accounts you have to export data to a zip file with some debug Lync commands and, even then, the information is buried in a hard to interpret XML file.

Lync and UM Correlation with Powershell

I’ve been working on an Exchange/Lync voice deployment lately and have found a new level of frustration for the lack of connectivity between the several voice components involved in turning up such a solution. That being said it is not very difficult to validate your deployment with a bit of Powershell.

There are a few necessary results to gather where I believe it can be easy to ‘miss’ configuration steps when turning up or disabling users:

PS Quickie: New-PIN

Setting a bunch of PINs for Lync devices is not difficult at all. Here is a script to pre-generate them should you find the need to do so. The function simply generates random digits between 0 and 9 and convert to a string. An exception is made for the first digit (as zeros are often not displayed in csv files when opened in excel) and only digits 1-9 are used.

Powershell: System Report Script Design

In this post I go back and explain some of my reasoning behind decisions I made in the design of an already released script, Get-AssetReport. This was written over a year ago and forgotten about as one of the many unpublished drafts on my blog. The code behind the script I discuss has been upgraded and used in several of my more popular scripts (AD Asset Report, F5 LTM Report, and Lync 2013 Status Report). Some of this content is slightly dated as I’ve since changed some of the coding but the core concepts are the same. Those digging through my crazy work or learning powershell may get some value from this content so I tidied it up a bit and here it is. Cheers!