3 Microsoft Exchange Administration Tasks to Perform with Windows PowerShell

Many small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and enterprises rely on Microsoft Exchange for their organizational communications system. As an Exchange administrator, there are a lot of things you can do with Windows PowerShell to make Exchange management easier.

We’ve compiled this helpful list of Petri IT Knowledgebase articles from our community-vetted experts that include Jeffery Hicks and Phoummala Schmitt on task-based solutions that can be used within your Exchange environment.

Manage Microsoft Exchange with Windows PowerShell

Generating Test Data for Exchange 2010 with PowerShell

Most IT admins would agree that maintaining a test environment is an essential task. A bigger challenge is making sure that your test environment simulates the production environment as much as possible. This challenge is much more achievable with Jeffery Hick’s solutions for simulating user logons with PowerShell. He’s also provided some great tips on how to create test data to send mail messages with PowerShell, along with advice for scaling and testing those workloads.

Creating Exchange 2010 Reports with PowerShell

You can simplify your Exchange reporting with PowerShell in several different ways. There’s quick and easy solutions for grabbing mailbox size reports for one or multiple mailboxes, or writing some PowerShell that meets your needs. You can also dive into a single mailbox to grab meaningful statistics with PowerShell. You can also apply many of the techniques you’d use for individual mailbox statistics on a larger scale for multiple mailboxes as well. And if you’re feeling ambitious, you can grab information for Exchange Server reports, too.

Deleting Email from Exchange Mailboxes with PowerShell

With Exchange 2010 and 2013, Microsoft included a capability that makes it easy for Exchange administrators to discretely cleanup user mailboxes. There’s certainly situations where it’s warranted, as it’s sometimes all too easy to accidentally send an email to, say, an entire distribution list. With that said, Phoummala Schmitt has some great advice on how to delete email from Exchange mailboxes with PowerShell.

How do you leverage PowerShell for your Exchange administration tasks? Drop me an email or touch base with me on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook (see below).