A few days ago a customer asked me about automating the CSV_Parser.ps1 script to create and manage mailboxes.  They wanted to run this script against an updating csv file containing student identity information on a scheduled basis.  Followers of this blog will know that when I demo PowerShell, I explicitly run through all of the steps required to get things motoring...manually entering in admin credentials and then whatever comes next.  This is fine... but you may have been wondering what to do if you want to hard-code your admin credentials so that you do not have to enter them manually.

I was interested in knowing how to do this as well... so I asked someone that had a clue, Richard Wakeman, for his input.  He recommended not making modifications to the CSV_Parser script, but instead create a short script to capture the credentials and then call the CSV_Parser script from within that.  An example of what this looks like is below:

# capture the admin LiveID username in a variable

$Username = "admin@yourdomain.edu"

# capture the admin LiveID password in a variable.  Note, that it is stored as a secure string

$Password = ConvertTo-SecureString 'YourPassword' -AsPlainText -Force

# populate the $Livecred PowerShell credential with $Username and $Password

$Livecred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $Username, $Password

# call the CSV_Parser.ps1 file in a new shell, feeding in the usual parameters

./CSV_Parser.PS1 –UsersFile “C:\Source\users.csv” -RemoteURL https://ps.exchangelabs.com/powershell -LiveCredential $Livecred -LogDirectory "C:\Logging\" -LogVerbose $true -ValidateAction $true

# Gracefully remove the runspace so as not to leave any orphaned connections

Get-RunSpace | Remove-RunSpace

So there you have it...happy automating!

Jonny

One cool thing about a hosted service is that changes can be made that benefit end customers on an on-going basis.

Over the weekend, the Exchange team just rolled out the ability to reset a password in the OWA Options for Exchange Labs administrators.

Using it is simple:

After signing in to Exchange Labs as an administrator, navigate to ‘OWA Options’ or just go to https://www.exchangelabs.com/ecp and make sure you have selected to manage ‘My Organization’

First thing you’ll see is the Mailboxes UI.  Search for the user you want to do the password reset on, highlight the username, then click ‘Reset Password’, a dialog box will open and you can change the users password.

…and that’s it!

Happy password resetting!

Don't forget, you can also do this programmatically.

Jonny

For those existing Live@edu customers out there that need to log a support call for any reason, you can now do so by using our new eForm here: https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wlpc&ct=eformts.  All incidents that are logged will be routed to a human working at Microsoft :)

I get to see some of the things that customers ask about from time, and sometimes these can be addressed by the help you can find on Technet, or this blog (but remember, I am not an official document source, just a field-based blogger when I am in between customer engagements :-) ).  Also, don't forget, you can also check out overall service status for Exchange Labs here.

I hope that all helps if you ever need it.

Jonny

I had been intending to do a post on this for some time, but like a lot of my intentions, they sometimes do not get much further than that :)  We have a lot of Exchange based offerings today, and Dmitry Sotnikov has just produced a nice, concise overview of his take on what we offer on his blog.

Some customers do find a lot of this challenging to get their heads around at times... but I do hope it demonstrates that we offer choice, and that we are serious about our Software plus Services strategy with some tangible offerings :)

Thanks Dmitry!

Jonny

One of the more popular Live services that customers like to provide their students with is SkyDrive; I even make use of it myself through this blog to distribute some files.  The SkyDrive team have just announced on their team blog that some improvements are in the works, and will be arriving with you all soon.  This is part of the overall Wave 3 upgrade to many of the other Live Services.

These include:

• An increase in the storage limit from 5GB to 25GB - a 500% increase!
• Improved facilities for working with photos, including a new slide show feature that is Silverlight enhanced, and the ability to order prints
• The ability to download a bunch of files at once in a .zip
• Improved file sharing options

All of this is coming soon...!

Enjoy!

Jonny

I had a conversation with a customer recently about setting mail forwards administratively.  They had 2 scenarios we discussed...perhaps there are some more you can think of?

One scenario was in the context of a migration to our Exchange Labs service where the institution had a list of all of the email addresses students used (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc). They wanted to provide students with their new Exchange Labs email addresses and set a forward on all of these mailboxes so that mail got delivered in 2 places until such time that students familiarized themselves enough with Exchange Labs to make the permanent switch.  The other scenario was where the institution wanted to investigate all incoming mail to a student's mailbox without the student knowing that this was happening or being able to turn this off.

Both of these can be achieved using the same method I outline below, but there are some things you should be aware of.

The command to do this in PowerShell, assuming you are pushed onto a runspace is:

Set-Mailbox jackjones -DeliverToMailboxAndForward:$True -ForwardingAddress dannyk

...where jackjones is the mailbox that you want to set the forwarding on, and dannyk is the name of the mailbox/contact/group/etc that you want mail forwarded to.  You can use the mailbox name, the SMTP address, the DN here; I am just keeping it short for convenience.

The key thing to be aware of is that you can only use this command to forward mail to objects that exist in the Exchange Labs Global Address List.  So in the first scenario outlined above, if you wanted to build this instruction into some bigger script that did this forward for 1000's of users, you would need to ensure that the target email addresses are all in your GAL as mail-enabled contacts first.  So this is not really a great option as you would end up with double entries for every individual you are managing.  A much better way to do this is to tell users to set up their own forwarding through the Outlook Web Access UI or Outlook 2007 interfaces through inbox rules.  For the second scenario, this method would be a much better choice; the setting does not show up in the user interface.

Hope this helps... if options change in the future, I will let you know.

Jonny

I know that many of our education customers are currently using or considering using Office Live Workspaces.

Well in case you did not know, the team behind this service have a community of their own incorporating a blog and a discussion forum.  These guys really do listen a lot to what our customers want, and now that we have formally announced our plans for Office 14 which will include significant investments in OLW, now is the time to make your voice heard.  So I suggest you run on over today and check them out.

Thanks!

Jonny

We have recently kicked off a project to get SSO working with our LiveID/Live@edu service and solutions built on J2EE; this is being done in conjunction with the University of New South Wales in Australia.  Anyone that is interested in seeing where we are at with this or even joining can do so by visiting http://www.codeplex.com/J2EELiveSSO.  The project is licensed through the MS-PL.

The 'main man' behind this from our end is Adam Bradley, and he was able to provide me with a high-level overview of what is happening.  Currently the project is more of a framework right now, but they are making steady towards some solution deliverables as  contributors continue to drop in initial components for a number of different portal and access management systems.  On the technical front, the solution is using Java 1.5, Apache-CXF 2.1 and enables mutual authentication via certificates.

Having worked on global solution sharing initiatives in previous roles in Microsoft, I am excited to see the momentum achieved here to date in a short space of time, and I would hope that this grows into something that delivers real value to our customers, and in this case, continues to demonstrate our commitment to interoperability with non-Microsoft platforms.

On a related note, we at Microsoft would be interested in hearing from you all about other projects like this that we could be kicking off.  The number of readers on this blog continues to grow at a brisk rate, as are the questions I get asked on a daily basis now.  I get asked a lot about how to script this and that from a service management point of view... would something addressing this be useful?  Drop me a mail, or put a note on the message board.

Cheers!

Jonny

Hot off the press, and of interest to those that may have noticed some changes to the Windows Live Administration Center in the last few days... this from Erik Desbois, PM for Exchange Labs.

You may have noticed a recent update to our Admin Center website https://domains.live.com/manage/ where some functionality was removed, specifically the ability to manage accounts. Some of you may have been using this site to do such things as ‘Password Resets’ on behalf of your users.

The update is in preparation for our R3 upgrade beginning in January and helps move administration from the Admin Center site to the Exchange Labs web management interface (found in OWA > ‘Options’) when you log into Exchange Labs, and to PowerShell where a much richer set of functionality and account management is available. You will soon find the password reset functionality added to Exchange Labs web management interface, making password resets an even easier task.

Please note the change is not service impacting but could affect some users that require administrative password reset. The good news is there are other ways to update passwords in Exchange labs outside of using Admin Center…

End user password reset:

End users who have added an alternate e-mail address to their profile can reset passwords themselves. They simply click Forgot your password? on the login screen and proceed from there.

PowerShell:

Remote PowerShell is our preferred administration tool for managing accounts in Exchange Labs.  Please see our help article Remote PowerShell with Exchange Labs

at  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchangelabshelp/cc546278.aspx to get started and set up. Please note, Remote PowerShell requires Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008

After getting set up visit our @edu blog site created by Jonny Chambers (Solution Specialist for @edu) who has a simple run through on using PowerShell to perform password reset. See: http://liveatedu.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C76EAE4D4A509FBD!430.entry

Thanks and I’ll update everyone shortly with an expectation of when Password reset available to admins in OWA Options.

-Erik

BTW. If you do not have Vista or WS2008 in your environment and must reset a password before the functionality is available in Exchange Labs, please feel free to download and use the Win32app known as EDUExpress which comes part of the Windows Live Admin Center SDK V3.0. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b8870b3c-4da6-464c-b95e-e7f605e77ef1&DisplayLang=en - Download the SDK and look for the tool ‘ManageDomain.exe’ in the Win32app directory. It’s used to manage Hotmail accounts, but in a pinch can be used to  enumerate users and perform password resets in Exchange Labs. The tool is not supported by Exchange Labs, so please limit its use very soon we’ll have password reset available in the Exchange Labs web interface.

Thanks!

Jonny

:Connect to Exchange Labs Runspace
1. $LiveCred = Get-Credential
2. $rs = New-Runspace -Shell Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.exchangelabs.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred  -Authentication Basic
3. push-runspace $rs

:Reset the password
4. set-mailbox -identity user@example.edu -password pass1234 

:Gracefully exit runspace
5. pop-runspace
6. Remove-Runspace $rs

You will get a message : "WARNING: The command completed successfully but no settings of 'user@example.edu' have been modified."  This can be ignored however.

Happy scripting!

Jonny

Just a quick note here as I have mentioned this to a few customers in recent days and none of them knew about this.

If you want to be able to chat with your messenger contacts, but you do not have access to the full installable client, you can do this online at http://webmessenger.msn.com. 

Happy web chatting!

Jonny

A customer asked me the other day about creating restricted distribution groups in Exchange Labs.  They wanted to create a mailing group for their student council and set not only who managed the group for making membership changes and the like, but also controlling who could mail to the group as they did not want just any old Joe Blow sending messages to it.

This can all be done manually through the Outlook Web Access UI, but if you want to put a process in place for creating groups like this en masse, or you are simply a scripting junkie and don't like GUIs for anything much, you may also want to consider the PowerShell route... both of which I cover in the recording attached to this post.

You can find a useful Technet article on the manual method here.  For PowerShell, you can see how to create groups here, and modify their properties here.

Double-Click to view in full screen.

 Download

For those of you that simply want the commands I use in my demo, here they are:

:Connect to Exchange Labs Runspace
1. $LiveCred = Get-Credential
2. $rs = New-Runspace -Shell Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.exchangelabs.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred  -Authentication Basic
3. push-runspace $rs

:Create a new Distribution Group
4. New-DistributionGroup -Name "Student Council" -Alias stucncl -DisplayName "Student Council" -Type Distribution

:Set the group restrictions
5. Set-DistributionGroup -Identity stucncl -AcceptMessagesOnlyFrom billg -ManagedBy billg

:Gracefully exit runspace
6. pop-runspace
7. Remove-Runspace $rs

Enjoy!

Jonny