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Adventures with SBS 2008 part 4 |
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Written by Nathan Woodcock
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Monday, 13 April 2009 |
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This is more about Exchange 2007 than Small Business Server 2008 but my exposure to it began and remains in SBS2008. Users of Exchange 2007/SBS2008 would have no doubt been exposed to the new Exchange Management Shell, a command line shell where pretty much the entire Exchange system is managed from. The GUI has lost a lot of the functionality from previous versions of Exchange which if you are a big system administrator making widespread changes across many users at once is not a problem but is a real pain for the small office worker who has previously doubled as the IT tech but now finds they have to learn a scripting language to perform some basic tasks or find out some basic information. An example of this is it is no longer possible to see a list of mailboxes with their sizes and item totals in the exchange management GUI, the only way to do this is from the exchange management shell command line and of course you have to know the command to do it. A useful resource is this MS webpage which lists some sample Exchange Management Shell scripts for performing a large number of common functions: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/scripts/message/exch2007/default.mspx?mfr=true I'm still perplexed as to why nobody has yet released a third party GUI for the exchange management shell which enables simpler viewing and modification of the Exchange setup for small number of users. I'd buy it, and I'd be able to sell it to several of my clients who are spending more money with me to do the simple tasks.
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