Creating a second Exchange Administrator using PowerShell

It is always best practice to have more than one Exchange Labs administrator for your organization, and this is for a number of reasons including auditing for account changes, illness, you name it, just like it is usually a good idea to have a spare key for your house or car (I keep mine under the doormat – joking :)).  In Exchange Labs, there are 2 types of administrator, the Windows Live Admin Center admin (who by default is also an Exchange Admin) and the Exchange Admin, of which you can have more than one.  Exchange Admins are not able to modify your domain settings or even log into http://domains.live.com, they can only manage mailboxes and distribution lists, see here for more details.

To create an Exchange Admin, you essentially promote an existing LiveID on your domain into the role.  Doing this in PowerShell is very straight forward and is the approach I would recommend you take for the sake of time-saving…but if you don’t feel like it, you can also use the CSV Import tool following the instructions here; if you want a demo of this let me know.

To see the demo in full size, double click the video screen.http://silverlight.services.live.com/invoke/71782/createasecondELadminuser/iframe.html

download

For your convenience, here are the commands I used in the demo pasted below for you.

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

:Create the new admin role for an existing LiveID
3. Invoke-Command {New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Name "Student Manager" -Role OrgManagement_Tenant -User admin2@students.exlablive.info} -RunSpace $rs

:Gracefully exit runspace
4. Remove-Runspace $rs

Thanks

Jonny