Category: Microsoft

Microsoft, Outlook

Exchange 2013/2016 – Select an Organizational Unit shows “There are no items to show in this view”

This was a frustrating issue to deal with in a large environment, effectively if you open any “Select an Organization Until” window such as when configuring rules for dynamics distribution groups you may see either a small number of OU records or no OU records at all, with the window simply stating “There are no items to show in this view”.

This most often occurs after Cumulative Updates are applied to a server but may be caused by a lack of configuration or a misconfiguration of the Exchange servers and will present as in the image below –

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Microsoft, Outlook

Exchange – Remove List of Permissions from Exchange Mailboxes

The PowerShell code below will take a CSV list of mailboxes and Users/Groups to remove from that mailbox. This allows you to quickly and efficiently remove old permissions across Exchange.

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Microsoft, PowerShell

PowerShell – How-To Retrieve SPN’s for all Servers

Yet another short one with little context or reason.

A colleague of mine needed a list of all Service Principal Names assigned to all servers on the estate. Searches online brought us to a few potential solutions, most of which included the use of some difficult to use and understand .NET classes which appeared to be limited to only 1000 results.

So that got me thinking, these are just Active Directory attributes so why not use PowerShells very own Get-ADComputer?

The script below will list every single server in Active Directory and all assigned SPN’s, it will then export the list to a CSV.

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PowerShell

PowerShell – Locate Inactive Users in Active Directory / Exchange On-Prem

Another short article with little context today.

The PowerShell script below will produce a report showing the Last Logon time of all enabled Active Directory users, it will also connect to Exchange On-Premise and request the last logon date of the mailbox. This can be useful to identify user accounts which are no longer in active use, even in organisations where mailboxes may have been retained once a user left.

There’s also a nifty status update built in that will tell you exactly how far the script has progressed and show an estimated time to completion.

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Microsoft, PowerShell

PowerShell – How to Retrieve Specific Events From All Servers

Occasionally you may have to implement something which will improve the security of your organisation but that does introduce a risk. Often the correct way to determine if it will cause issues is to enable logging and then to review those logs.

But what if you don’t have centralised logging?

This article does not replace a fully functional centralised event logging system which I would strongly suggest anybody have, however, it will allow you to retrieve specific logs from all servers in your estate. If your estate is too large then the script can be modified to instead of storing all of the data in the $allEvents variable you could simply append it to an Excel file inside of the for each loop.

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Microsoft

Exchange 2016 – User account isn’t a member of the ‘Schema Admins’ or ‘Enterprise Admins’ group

This is a frustrating issue to come across when trying to roll out AD Schema Updates during an Exchange Cumulative Upgrade. But luckily it’s normally quite simple to resolve, this article will cover the various solutions from most to least likely to fix the issue.

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Microsoft

How to Search Subfolders in System Center 2012 – SCCM

The amount of time wasted before realising how to do this simple thing isn’t worth thinking about, but luckily it’s very easy in SCCM to search in all subfolders and it can be done by doing the following –

  1. Navigate to any asset that contains a search bar at the top.
  2. Select the Search Bar to ensure that the Search toolbar menu appears.
  3. In the Search menu, select “All Subfolders” as shown below, this will search the current node and all subfolders.
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Microsoft, Outlook, PowerShell

Exchange – Extend Email Approval Expiration

Exchange has a brilliant feature called ‘Email approval’ that can be configured using mail flow rules. This allows emails to configured recipients to be redirected to a user or a mailbox where it must be approved before reaching it’s final destination.

By default, any emails awaiting approval for between 2-7 days will expire and will be automatically rejected and this is entirely dependent on when the system task runs to clear the mailboxes.

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