Jason Yoder, MCT

Good thing I fired up an Exchange server this week’s for my PowerShell class.  Here is a quick answer to a problem one of the my class attendees had.  How to hide someone from the Global Address List (GAL) using PowerShell.  In the Exchange Admin Center, you can configure this in the user’s mailbox general properties. We had a discussion about what is in the GUI and what is in PowerShell. The direction that Microsoft is moving is a GUI free environment, at least on the servers.  PowerShell is designed to do what the GUI can, and cannot do.  We simply need to find the path.  Fortunately, the path to success on this one was simple. 1 2 Get-Mailbox -Identity jyoder | Set-Mailbox -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $True Line 1 will get the mailbox object of the user in question and pipe the object to line 2. Line 2 uses the Set-Mailbox cmdlet and it’s HiddenFromAddressListEnabled property.  When set to $True, the address is hidden.  Let...

We started off class this morning in a Q&A session.  One of the questions was how to get the public folder permissions on an Exchange Server.  In this example, Exchange Server 2013 is being used. 1 2 Get-PublicFolder -Recurse |     Get-PublicFolderClientPermission Line 1 Gathers all of the Public folder objects, including subfolders. Line 2 Gathers the user rights on each public folder and then displays them FolderName            User                  AccessRights                                                       ----------     ...

So, what do I do while my class is working on labs?  Well, if I’m not answer emails from the Navy, I’m working on some side projects.  Right now, I’m working on a project to grab meta data via geographical coordinates. When I develop code, I brake the objective down into manageable parts.  I then look at each part and ask myself if I know how to do it.  For each part that I do not know how, I start writing code to discover the path to success. Well, while working on a bit of code, I needed to increment my value for latitude by .05.  Something odd happened so I wrote out a small bit of code to focus in on the issue.  Here is the code. $Increment = .05 $Start = 0 $Value2 = $Start   While ( $Value2 -lt 10 ) {     Write-host $Value2     $Value2 += $Increment } The data type of $Value2 is Double .  Everything starts out fine. 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 Until… 3.45 3.5 3.55 3.6 3.65 3.6999999999...

This weekend I built an entirely new virtual environment for my PowerShell classes moving forward.  Essentially I did this to add in some SQL, Exchange and DSC scenarios.  Just in time to.  I have two Exchange administrators in my PowerShell class this week here in Fort Wayne so I am using my new setup to enhance the class.  Here is the first one. How do I let all of the public folders, including sub folders? The Get-PublicFolder cmdlet can be used for this.  Here is the public folder structure that I created using the New-PublicFolder cmdlet. Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Folder1     Folder2       FolderA       Folder1A     Folder2A   FolderB   This command will recover all the public folders and their parents. PS C:> Get-PublicFolder -Recurse | Select -Property name,parentpath   Name         ParentPath     ...

Already integrated into my PowerShell code for rapidly building new VMs. Any GUI only admins out there getting nervous yet? There you have it!!!  Your interface. OK, for those of you who have taken my PowerShell classes, just type PowerShell and press Enter . Look, colorization in the shell!!! Don’t worry, SCONFIG still works.  For those of you from my server classes, you know what to do at this point. I’m going to play for a while.  Have fun everybody with the preview!

This has been a problem since I had Windows 8 on a very expensive laptop.  I’ve heard of it on Windows 7, but never had the pleasure of being introduced to the problem.  After I upgraded to Windows 8.1, I still had the problem.  The first time this happened was particularly embarrassing. I popped up while teaching a Windows class online.  Of course a new bug pops up when you are in front of the public.  Here is what is going on. I open multiple windows, like most over achievers.  All of the sudden, one window will not lose focus and fall behind the others.  Up until now, the only way to work around this issue was to do one of two things.  Minimize the problematic window or close and re-open the application.  Since I like to switch between applications using Alt-Tab, this was a no go for me.  Unfortunately, it was my only option. I just discovered this fix.  With the problematic window in focus, press Ctrl-Alt-Esc. No idea why, but...