One regular task for Exchange admins can be reclaiming free space within Exchange mailbox stores either after a large amount of data has been removed or just a significant amount has built up over time for various reasons. For those of you who don’t know, to reclaim the space the mailbox store has to be taken offline and the database defragged to get the space back on the disk. Finding good candidates for defragging especially in a large environment with multiple databases and Exchange servers can be a pretty tedious task.

So I was lucky enough to receive an invite from Nathan Winters who runs the MM&M User Group UK (aka Exchange) to present at their next meeting on Wednesday 18th February at Microsoft in London. It will be an evening around using Powershell to manage Exchange, the agenda is as below: 18:15 - 18:40 Arrival 18:40 - 18:45 Introduction to speakers and the aims of the group 18:45 - 19:30 1st session; Jonathan Medd, Introduction to PowerShell and Using PowerShell to manage Exchange 2003!

…i.e. a budget of £0. (Update 28/01/09 - FYI..got some feedback about this post and the reason we are not using the built in alerts in the VI client is because the CPU alerts in this case were not granular enough for us.) So this all stemmed from trying to track down which process was causing particular servers’ CPU to hit 100% for a period. So first of all my colleague and Get-Scripting co-host Alan Renouf traded a script back and forth which ended up as the CheckHighCPU function - it is now pretty cool and comes back with a list of processes sorted by how much CPU they are using and very importantly for our circumstance who is the owner of each process.

The January meeting of the UK Powershell User Group takes place Wednesday 21st Jan 2009 6.30pm GMT. Memphis Room Building 3 Microsoft Campus TVP Reading UK We have a Live Meeting with Jeffrey Snover talking about PowerShell v2 Pizza break Then Jeremy Pack from HP will then be doing a PowerShell demo - exact topic to be confirmed It should be a great evening. Jeffrey is obviously the man to ask if you have any burning questions about Powershell, particularly V2 for this event.

Recently I’ve been testing out some different disaster recovery scenarios for Exchange 2003, one of which involved a dial-tone method - i.e. create some new mailbox servers with blank databases to get users up and running quickly and then merge the restored data back in later. One of the types of dial tone method we used was to create new server names rather than re-use existing Exchange server names. So for example to re-create a four node (3 active, 1 passive) cluster with new names, instead of

Recently I blogged about some scripts I left behind in my previous employment for managing AD - really a lot of them were just quick one liners. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, one of the best things for me about Powershell is the way you can get great information with very little effort. Of course I am using my good friend the Quest AD cmdlets. I thought I’d share a few of them:

So we got Episode 6 of the Get-Scripting Podcast out last week. You can get it from here: Download it here, subscribe in iTunes or via a different feed reader Normally Alan, Matt and I all arrange to be in the same place to record the show. Given we live in completely different places in the UK this is not easy and is probably the main reason we keep it to one show per month.

I was recently invited to record a webcast by the Product Manager at Quest for PowerGUI, Darin Pendergraft, demoing the Exchange 2003 Powerpack I made for PowerGUI. They came up with the idea to make some videos / webcasts giving some community members the opportunity to show what PowerGUI can do. A lot of people primarily use it only as a script editor, but the management console side of things is brilliant once you get into it - hopefully these examples will help inspire more people to make some powerpacks.

So I was pretty sceptical for a long while about things like Twitter and Facebook, but I finally gave in mostly thanks to my buddy Alan Renouf and to be honest its been brilliant. Its such a useful way to quickly find information and keep up to date with a particular topic, obviously in my case Powershell. Whilst at Teched it was a great tool to keep up with things which were going on in sessions or what people where up to.

This is a must watch PowerScripting Podcast special - the hint is in the title. Jeffrey Snover and Bruce Payette are the two guests, it should be an awesome show. Thursday 18th Dec 9pm EST, which translates to 2am UK time. I think I’m going to have to stay up for it!