Outlook 2010: Photo Sizing Tool

We are about to get into full swing with our Exchange 2010 mailbox migrations and, soon afterwards, Office 2007 to 2010 upgrades as well. Unfortunately, we don’t have our Sharepoint farm upgraded to 2010 yet so there will be no automatic syncing of user photos into the GAL for those nice vanity pics which you can view in Outlook 2010. I know people like to be seen so I found a nice powershell based GUI for our (awesome) service desk team to use to upload these photos for users as requested. But you still have to get these photos thumbnailed to approximately 96×96 before uploading. Repeated manual labor is the anathema of any self respecting sysadmin who knows how to hack other people’s code to suit their needs. So I whipped up a very dirty (as in, “wow, get the bar of soap” dirty) hack which combines this person’s clever photo-sizing hack with the prior mentioned gui.

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ESX + MSCS 2008 R2 + SQL Server 2008

Just a quick note on this little combo. Should you be looking to setup a windows 2008 R2 cluster in a virtual environment (details on specific vmware configuration left to the reader) here are some quick notes that I have on some caveats. 1.) Either keep vmware tools un-uninstalled or make certain not to install the Shared Folder component of vmware tools. 2.) Don’t clone the second node from the first using vmware. Continue reading

Exchange: Remove entire OU from address book

Here is another script that I hacked together in part of an AD/Exchange cleanup task to remove disabled users from the address book. This script, more specifically, removes an entire OU of users from the address book, so make sure that all the users are disabled in the OU you will be running this against! 🙂

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