Exchange 2013: Server Component State Script

Exchange 2013 includes some powershell commands which allow you to set and view several components in the messaging infrastructure. This is important to be aware of as it means all Exchange related services can be running when looking at them in service manager (services.msc) but not actually doing anything. I went ahead put together a script to better gather this information for administrators.

Lync: Voice Route Diagram Creation Script

Lync voice routing boils down to three basic components working in concert to decide call flow. It seems quite simple on paper, you assign voice policies which determine call routes based on PSTN usages (often called the ‘glue’). After looking at Lync voice routing way too many times I finally caved into producing a script to create diagrams of the things over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

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: