Managing Mailboxes with Exchange Management Shell

Executive Summary:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007's Exchange Management Shell lets you easily accomplish your mailbox management tasks with Windows PowerShell commands, known as cmdlets. You can create single mailboxes with the New-Mailbox cmdlet, or use the foreach command to create bulk mailboxes imported from comma-separated value (CSV) files. Use the Get-Mailbox cmdlet in Exchange Management Shell to view properties of a mailbox and the Set-Mailbox cmdlet to update mailbox properties. Exchange Management Shell also has commands for controlling mailbox permissions.

Exchange Server 2003 has been justly criticized for its management tools for working with mailbox objects. Exchange administrators commonly need to manipulate multiple mailboxes at one time, but the Exchange 2003 tools for doing so are weak. You can enable a group of users for mailbox access, but if you want to do something more subtle—say, turn on Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) for members of an Active Directory (AD) group—you're reduced to writing your own scripts. There's a lot of demand for how-to information about mailbox management (which is why I co-wrote Exchange Server Cookbook ), but Exchange Server 2007, and in particular Exchange Management Shell, dramatically improves the toolset we have for mailbox management. . . .