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September 2005 Entries
More on Exchange PDC 2005 demo

To make a long story short: I gave Adam our demo VPC of E12, which includes Monad, but then gave him the wrong password to unlock the machine… Dang it! Check the orginal article at proudlyserving.com. Only one more thing to add. So what exactly did we demo? Here it is. We used Use monad cmdlets, written by Exchange team to:

  1. Install and uninstall a demo managed Transport Agent
  2. Get the list of all running agents, their status and their priority
  3. Create a set of users in the AD
  4. Create storage groups and mailbox databases
  5. Mail enable the set of new users and load balance them across the newly created SGs
The first two items are handled by Install-TransportAgent, Uninstall-TransportAgent and Get-TransportAgent. I wrote a MSH script to handle the last three. The amazing thing was that it was really easy… basically the script consists of calls to new-mailbox, new-storagegroup and new-mailboxdatabase. The thing that impresses people is that the script is driven off a csv file  : import-csv input.csv | provision-server.msh Simply pipe a csv file into the script and it magically creates the users and load balances your SGs. In the old days you have do lots of COM, WMI, ADSI to ge the same effect (if you could do it at all)… but I can gaurantee that the E12 method is much much easier (not to mention way cooler)! Keep reading this blog as I will be slowly (timing is everything) posting more Exchange script content.
posted @ Saturday, September 24, 2005 12:09 PM | Feedback (0)
PDC 2005: Summary
This PDC we made some bug announcements as a company (Sparkle, Longhorn, VS etc.), as well as some related to Exchange and Monad:
  • We have deprecated and cut some APIs, full list is available through this blog entry at the Exchange blog.
  • Bob Muglia (VP of Windows Server) put Monad on the roadmap as appearing in 2006
  • Exchange announced that Monad will be the way that users manage Exchange through script and cmdline
  • Exchange announced that Exchange cmdlets will replace our WMI providers and CDOExM (see previous link for more informaiton)
  • Instead of using things like CDO, WebDAV, the IW and PIM access will be available through web services. This stuff is really cool. We demo’d how in a 4-5 lines you can emulate what Outlook is doing through web services. As a sidebar, I have a pet project to use these APIs to build a cmdline mail app in Monad… good demonstration of both worlds!

The feedback was good, and reaffirmed our choices. Karim and John were expecting some tomatoes, but none were thrown . In fact, folks cheered the direction we’re taking. As always, let us know how we can improve our APIs and developer interfaces, we’re listening.

posted @ Thursday, September 15, 2005 12:09 PM | Feedback (0)
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A little slow these days as I'm busy working on exchangelabs.com. I will try and post tidbits when I get some time. Enjoy the older posts till then!
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