Exchange-Genie

As we all now know Exchange 2007 introduced Exchange Management Shell or EMS and at first I really was not that in love with the command line but as I got to know it better and started to see how useful it could be, my views started to change. I myself am not the best script person so I still fumble my ways through some scripts but have made vast improvements.

I have alway heard of the how Exchange puts the data in the pipeline and read Evans blog (http://msexchangeteam.com/articles/72684.aspx) about it but never really truely grasp the concept until Evan and I had an email conversation about it and it all sunk in.

I started to do some queries that where resource intensive and time consuming, do to the nature of my environment. For my lack of coding skills I would write the same line multiple times to get the data I wanted. I knew it was not efficient but it worked for me.

So lets say I wanted to see how many users where using Active Sync on the mail system
I would do somthing like this to get the data
Before###
(Get-mailbox -resultsize:unlimited % {Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics -mailbox $_.alias}).count
This command would provide me with a count of the number of users

but now I also wanted to find out what phones they where using so I would write another line of code
(Get-mailbox -resultsize:unlimited % {Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics -mailbox $_.alias}) ft identity,

You see this runs the same command 2 times and generates a lot of overhead

So lets look at how to use the pipline
Now#####
#Mobile Report#This script will get the number of user that have used mobile devices to
#sync. There could be more than 1 device per users#

#this clears the
screenclear-host

write-host -fore yellow “Please wait as the system runs the report this will take a few moments”
#Gets the count of user
$data=(Get-mailbox -resultsize:unlimited % {Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics -mailbox $_.alias})

write-output “`nCurrently devices have synced with the system”

write-output $data.count
#This prints out the user identity which say the email address and device used
write-host -fore Green “`nThe following users have synced with the system”$data ft identity

You can see how I now run 1 queries but set the return to a variable of $data. This basically puts all the data in an Array that we can call on to access.

$data.count = returns the number of users
$data ft identity returns the identity field

By passing our data to a variable we can put the data in the pipline that can be accessed multiple time and maniupated w/o the overhead of multiple queries.