Like most IT books, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out is a huge doorstop of a book. Since my boss was kind enough to purchase it, and I’m by far the department’s foremost reader of English and its least-experienced Exchange admin, I’ve decided to try to read the whole thing, a chapter a day.

It’s already paid off – I solved a problem using it just a day after reading the fantastic “Exchange Management Shell” chapter.

When a user gets transferred to a location in another domain in our Active Directory forest, he gets a new user account in that domain, but his old mailbox is moved to the Exchange server for that location in the new domain. Occasionally, something goes wrong and the mailbox ends up in a disconnected state – in this case, the old account was deleted before the mailbox was connected to the new one. The real problem was that the help desk staff member who did the move couldn’t remember which mailbox database (or even server) he moved the mailbox to…

Exchange Management Shell and Tony Redmond to the rescue!

The script below is adapted from “Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out”, page 132, mostly to overcome the pipelining problem Tony describes in the “Code changes required by remote PowerShell” section on page 120. I ran this, as I run everything I can, in an implicit Exchange remoting session in my trusty PowerGUI, rather than in Exchange Management Shell itself. Make sure you are either implicitly remoted to an Exchange server or in Exchange Management Shell before running it.

$mbxServers = (Get-MailboxServer | ForEach-Object { $_.name })
Foreach ($mbxserver in $mbxServers) {Get-MailboxStatistics -Server $mbxserver `
| where {$_.disconnectdate -ne $null } | select displayname,OriginatingServer, `
DisconnectDate,LastLoggedOnUserAccount,LastLogonTime,TotalItemSize,Database `
| Export-Csv c:\temp\$mbxserver-disconnectedmailboxes.csv -NoTypeInformation }

The main weakness is that it will only find disconnected mailboxes on 2007 or 2010 servers, but that’s because Get-MailboxStatistics only works on those newer mailboxes.

Tony Redmond’s blog: http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/