In Exchange 2010 there is actually somewhere to publish these settings - and once configured your documentation won't need to be updated if the server details change. You'll find these settings by logging into OWA, and choosing Options. The link "Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access…" should be shown on the default "My Account" page:

By default, nothing will be listed if you click the link:

To configure these links, it's a fairly straightforward process. Before you begin, you need to know what the settings should be and in the case of the SMTP settings, which receive connector on which Hub Transport this relates to.

First, you configure the Client Access servers for the POP and IMAP settings, using the Set-POPSettings and Set-IMAPSettings cmdlets with the -ExternalConnectionSettings parameter.

For each protocol you specify a colon-separated list of values for the ExternalConnectionSettings. For POP3 with TLS, this might be "casserver.contoso.com:110:tls" or POP3 with SSL might be "casserver.contoso.com:995:ssl". IMAP with TLS might be "casserver.contoso.com:143:tls" and IMAP with SSL might be "casserver.contoso.com:993:ssl".

Here's a quick example of the commands against my test setup:

It's important to remember, you need to run the command on all Client Access servers users will access.

Next, you need to allow the receive connector that you want "published" to advertise it's settings. You do this with the Set-ReceiveConnector cmdlet specifying the -AdvertiseClientSettings:$true parameter and value.

In my example, I want to advertise the port 587 "client" receive connector on my Hub Transport server:

Finally, run iisreset to restart IIS on each Client Access Server, the log back into OWA (well, ECP) and test the "Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access…"  link again. It should now show the settings specified:

For further reading check out Set-IMAPSettings, Set-POPSettings and Set-ReceiveConnector.

(Just a footnote- thanks to Jag at Microsoft for providing this information)

"On the client side features like auto mapping of shared mailboxes to user’s Outlook 2010 profiles will remove a support headache."

As it's one of my favourite new features and there's not much documentation yet, I wanted to write a little more about the feature and demonstrate how it works in practice.

How it works

When you add full mailbox permissions on Exchange 2010 SP1 to a new or existing shared mailbox that's also on SP1, Exchange now updates an Active Directory attribute on the shared mailbox itself, named msExchDelegateListLink. This is a multi-value attribute containing a list of DNs (Distinguished Names) of the other mailboxes that have full access to the mailbox and should auto-map that mailbox:

When Outlook 2010 launches it searches for mailboxes that have the user's mailbox DN listed and displays them below the user's primary mailbox.

In previous versions this was accomplished by going to the user's Exchange accounts settings, going to "More Settings", choosing "Advanced" and entering the shared mailbox manually under "Open these additional mailboxes" as shown below.

For any organisation making use of a large number of shared mailboxes this is a bit of a pain as IT needs to both write documentation so users can do this themselves and in many cases do it for the user. The new feature simply removes this step.

The catch (!) is that just moving a shared mailbox to SP1 or upgrading isn't enough to enable the feature. As it's an extra attribute added at the same time as the permissions, you need to remove and re-add the permissions via the normal way (EMC or Powershell's Remove-MailboxPermission/Add-MailboxPermission) to make this take effect, or do it yourself via ADSI scripting/AD Powershell (probably not very supported!).

Demonstration

Just to give you a quick demo of how simple this is, all you need to do is add permissions on the Shared Mailbox in the normal way:

Then on the client, close and ppen Outlook. The Shared Mailbox should show after a few seconds:

Yes, it's really that simple. Simple enough that you might use it without even noticing and wonder how that shared mailbox got mapped in the first place.. But I think it's definitely going to be a feature any IT department that routinely adds/removes permissions for mailboxes this way will appreciate.

Here's a little bit of code that you can use to synchronise a text file with a list of recipient primary email addresses to a distribution group. A good use for it would be where you have exports from an application system to determine mailing lists that the users should be a member of, and want to keep the two in sync.

The format of the input file is simply - just the primary email addresses, one per line.

Steve

So, with Outlook Live and Exchange 2010 On-Premise there is a pretty good opportunity to get Exchange working seamlessly between both systems. I’ll be covering a unified login in a further article (once I’ve re-written the code we use in-house into a re-distributable form) and if there’s any interest I’m also happy to cover using a single autodiscover service as well. But for now, I’m focusing on the user experience with free/busy and calendar sharing.

One of the areas might expect to “just work” is free/busy and calendar sharing between on-premise and cloud. The options are there, it looks like it tries to do it.. But the end user ust gets unfriendly error messages and “permission denied” errors. To get this up and running in Exchange 2010 SP1 is actually now pretty simple. No expensive certificates required from a handful of providers – you can use a self-signed certificate and it’s easy enough to get up and running with in less than an hour. In this article, I’m going to show you how…

Pre-requisites

First things first, we need a few things in-place and working already before we can get going. The main pre-req is Autodiscover, but I won’t cover how to set this up, as it's is covered in detail elsewhere on the good old ‘net..

• Autodiscover working for On-Premise for the domain you want to use (using DNS names, not a service records)
• Autodiscover working for Outlook Live for the domain you want to use (again, using DNS names, not a service record)
• Separate domains for on-premise and Outlook Live (I’m testing getting shared working – follow up article to come)
• Exchange 2010 CAS Connectivity to *.outlook.com
• Org admin rights on Exchange 2010 SP1 and Tenant Admin rights on Outlook Live, along with Powershell access to both.
• Access to manage the DNS for both domains and add TXT records.

Once that’s all setup and available, you should be ready to go..

Setting it up

To keep things simple, we’re not going to do anything too complicated, we’re going to set things up so all users in both on-premise and Outlook Live can see each other’s free/busy and share calendars (and contacts). Also, for the purposes of this article it’s assumed no Sharing Policy is setup already.

On our test setup, we’ve got two domains:
On Premise: contoso.astonuniversity.net
Outlook Live: live.contoso.astonuniversity.net

Basically we need to create three things on-premise – A Federation Trust to authenticate us against the MS Federation Gateway, then an Organization Relationship to say Outlook Live can see in for Free busy, and finally a Sharing Policy to allow on-premise users to share their calendars with Outlook Live users. In Outlook Live the trust with MS’s Federation Gateway is there by default so we just need the Organization Relationship to allow On-premise to see in and the Sharing Policy to allow the Outlook Live users to share with On-premise users.

First, we’ll setup the on-premise config, then get the Outlook Live stuff done. Afterwards we’ll test everything works.

On Premise Config

Step One – Setup a New Federation Trust using a self – signed certificate

First you need to make a new certificate. Create one using the following command:

Note down the Thumbprint in the output, and then create the Federation Trust using that thumbprint value. Note that we’re manually setting the MetaDataURL. This is why we can’t do it in the Exchange Management Console – SP1 by default works against a new “Business” gateway. Outlook Live currently works against a legacy “Consumer” gateway and the URL below switches us to use that one.

Next, we need to setup a record in DNS that will be used to verify we own the domain and allocate us an ApplicationID for our domain.

Copy “Proof” entry that is output, and get ready to enter it into DNS (BTW the DnsRecord syntax will be wrong, just ignore it)

If you use Windows DNS, it goes a little something like this:

And if it’s Unix:

Once that’s in, reload/HUP your DNS and make sure you can resolve it, both from your Exchange servers and from the outside world. The following command should work:

Now we’ve got the Federated Trust and DNS record sorted, we can get ourselves properly setup with the Federated Gateway. To do this, we use the Set-FederatedOrganizationIdentifier command:

Assuming that completes successfully, we can move onto the next step..

Step Two– Setup the On-Premise Organization Relationship

The next step is to allow our Outlook Live domain to see our On-premise Free/Busy info. You can do this via Powershell or the Exchange Management Console:

Via Powershell:

Test that you can get the federation info for your Outlook Live domain. If you get an error, run the command again with the -Verbose parameter for a detailed error and check your autodiscover setup for Outlook Live:

Next, configure the relationship. The LimitedDetails option below is the most open setting for the relationship, which means any user who has chosen to show that much detail will also make it available to the Outlook Live tenant.

If you'd rather configure via Exchange Management Console:

Navigate to Organization Configuration, and select the Organization Relationships Tab. Right click in the whitespace and choose “New Organization Relationship”:

in the New Organization Relationship window, Give a the new relationship a friendly name (e.g. Outlook Live).  Select the checkbok "Enable this organization relationship", then choose to enable free/busy access. Choose “Free/busy access with time, plus subject and location” to select the widest access. This means any user who has chosen to show that much detail (i.e. people can see that on-premise right now) will also share it to Outlook Live.

Next enter the Outlook Live domain in the Automatically discover configuration information text box, and press Next.

Check for any errors, and press Finish. If there are errors, and it isn't a typo, then it’s likely to be an Autodiscover issue -  but you'll find out most detail on the possible cause if you use the Powershell instructions above.

The new relationship should now be listed underneath Organization Relationships:

Step 3 – Setup the Sharing Policy

To enable our on-premise users to share their information with Outlook Live users we need a sharing policy setup. While you can setup multiple sharing policies and assign them to different users, for this basic sharing we’re going to modify the default sharing policy

Via Powershell:

First, check your settings. Note down the existing Domains value.

Replace the domains value on the Default Sharing Policy setting the original value (or remove it, if you want) and adding the Outlook Live domain. For the Outlook Live domain we're setting the maximum scope for sharing:

If you'd prefer to configure the sharing policy via the Exchange Management Console:

Navigate to Organization Configuration > Mailbox > Sharing Policies, then right click the Default Sharing Policy, then choose Properties:

In the Default Sharing Policy Properties, choose “Add”, then specify the Outlook Live domain. To allow for the maxium level of detail to be shared by individual users,  select the last option “Calendar sharing with free/busy information plus subject, location and body, Contacts sharing:

And that’s it for On-Premise. Next.. We need to get the hosted environment setup with with the corresponding parameters:

Outlook Live Setup

For the Outlook Live setup you have to use Powershell – Exchange Management Shell isn’t supported when managing your hosted tenant. If you’re not sure how to connect Powershell see the guide on the Outlook.com help site, but it basically looks a little like this:

Step 1: Setup the Outlook Live Organization Relationship

We get to miss out the first step that we had to do on-premise, setup of the federation trust, because as a tenant of the outlook.com Exchange environment this has already in place.. So we can skip to getting an organization relationship setup with our on-premise domain.

First, we check that we can indeed discover the correct settings by using the Get-FederationInformation command, specifying the on-premise domain:

The output from the command should show details matching the Organization Identifier and Application URI we setup earlier, along with the details of the on-premise Autodiscover environment.

If it returns a failure you may need to double check your Autodiscover settings for the on-premise environment, or in some cases you may need to give it a little while (if you just setup your Federation Trust on-premise) and try again. For example, in my production environment it took around an hour for my production Outlook Live tenant to be able to discover the Federation Information although my test domains could see the same information without any issues.

So.. After you’ve tested Outlook Live can discover the Federation Information, it’s onto actually creating the Organization Relationship. The command is exactly the same as on-premise,we are really just swapping the domain:

Step 2: Setup the sharing policy

Finally, it’s on to the final step – getting the sharing policy sorted. Check out what the Default Sharing Policy currently is before we go and add our on-premise domain:

Then replace the Domains list for the Default Sharing Policy with a value that includes the on-premise domain. In the example below, I’m keeping the settings that were already there and adding the on-premise domain. For consistency, I'm also keeping the same sharing level as set on-premise:

After that, it should all be done. Give it a little bit of time (say, 15 minutes) for everything to take effect and we should be ready to have a play..

Testing it out

For testing purposes on my two domains, on-premise “contoso.astonuniversity.net” and Outlook Live “live.contoso.astonuniversity.net”, I’ve created test accounts in each –“onpremise@contoso.astonuniversity.net” and “outlooklive@live.contoso.astonuniversity.net”. For the screenshots I’ve used OWA, but it works equally well in Outlook.

The first test is for Free/Busy. I’ve created a few test appointments in both calendars and you’ll see availability works just as if the user was on-premise:

In Outlook Live, scheduling a new meeting with the on-premise user as an attendee:

Next, via on-premise Exchange 2010 SP1, with our Outlook Live user as an attendee this time:

The second test is to check it is possible to share a calendar either way, and this is where it strays slightly away from the full range of options available to users within a single environment.

The limitations we’ve got mean that the user must share the calendar using OWA or Outlook 2010, and must use the “share this calendar” options rather than setting permissions directly. The recipient of the permission must add the calendar using the resulting email (they can’t just add it by name) and it’s read-only. this of course means the process can’t be easily automated, but it does allow users to use a common workflow to share folders, via the “share” options.

Sharing a calendar in Outlook Live:

On-premise user receives the sharing invitation and chooses “Add this calendar” to add it:

After adding the calendar, it’s shown in red (in OWA, anyway) while the server retrieves the calendar:

After a minute or so, the Outlook Live calendar shows up alongside the On-premise calendar:

Finally, let's test it from On-premise to Outlook Live:

Select the Calendar’s “Share” option to share the calendar (it's worth noting that the OWA UI has changed between RTM and SP1.. but I digress):

Over in Outlook Live, the Outlook Live user receives the invitation and again, chooses the “Add this calendar” link:

After choosing to add the calendar, the on-premise calendar shows (again after a minute or so to do the first sync)  alongside the Outlook Live calendar:

Contacts sharing is again a similar process, although it must be shared using Outlook 2010. Simply right click a contacts folder and choose Share>Share Contacts:

And that’s it – hopefully this will work for you, but if you have any questions or any issues, just use the comments form below.

Read more (including my comments) over on the Exchange Team Blog or download direct from the Microsoft website.

Quick tip - if you're planing on installing, make sure you check out the pre-reqs.. You WILL need to install quite a few.

For a recent migration from a Unix system (Dovecot + SquirrelMail) to Outlook Live, I came across this very scenario. While Microsoft provide IMAP migration tools to move mail to Outlook Live (which I was lucky enough to beta test before it was widely available), no tools are provided to move other data such as contacts and calendars.

While this isn’t the actual code I used (I wrote my original code in C#), I’ve re-visited what I’ve done and listened to what others say they need. What I’ve heard is it would be useful to have some Powershell code that out-of-the box can import contacts into any Exchange mailbox. The reason that Powershell is the right language for code like this is that it’s fairly easy for the enterprising administrator to modify to their needs.

Getting started

Before you can run this script, there are a few things you need to set up first. Don’t worry though! It’s nothing too onerous – all is needed to get going is two things:

1. Setup of EWS  impersonation, unless you only want to work with accounts you know the username/password for.
2. Installing the Managed API DLL onto your computer.

Setup of Exchange Web Services Impersonation
Exchange Web Services is the programmatic interface to each user’s Exchange mailbox. Most actions that can be performed in Outlook can be performed via EWS – so much so, in fact, that Apple’s Mail.app in Snow Leopard and the latest update for Entourage 2008 use EWS as the backend for the mail clients themselves.

If you’re planning on doing a mass-import of contacts, or don’t know the user’s password you’re importing, then setup of EWS impersonation is the step you need to take to allow a trusted account to switch to the user you want to import.

In Exchange 2010, setup of Exchange impersonation is managed via RBAC. Full details of how to setup impersonal are on the Microsoft site, but if you just want to get it setup for a single admin/service account, org-wide, use the following command substituing serviceaccount for your service account:

On Exchange 2007, it’s very different, and is managed by AD permissions on individual Client Access Servers. Again – full details on the Microsoft site, but to add the permission to all CAS servers, the following code will suffice, again substituting serviceaccount for your Service account:

Installing the Exchange Web Services Managed API
Next, whatever environment you are in, you need a copy of the DLL file that provides the bits and pieces that make this all work. The easiest way to get up and running is to download the API (choosing the right version for your platform), and install it to it’s default location.

Download the EWS Managed API from the Microsoft site

Once downloaded and installed, you should be good to go with script.

Using the script Import-MailboxContacts.ps1

So, you’ve got impersonation setup if needed, got the EWS DLL on your machine. You should be good to go!

For each mailbox you want to import contacts from you need a separate CSV file. The format of the file is intentionally the same as Outlook will export in, mainly because a lot of apps already export in the format (Gmail does, for example) so you should find it easy to get test data, but if you haven’t I’ve included a sample file to get you started.

Along with the data, you also need, at a minimum, the mailbox email address to import to. This is used when impersonating, and for Autodiscover. If you’re not logged on as the user you want to use for the import, you can specify a username and password. Additionally, there’s a variety of options to specify the EWS Url manually, switching to the Exchange 2007 version of the API etc.

Examples

The first example is a straightforward import into the current logged-on user’s mailbox. We’re specifying the Email Address and the URL to EWS (to bypass Autodiscover):

As you can see in the above example – it’s all fairly straightforward. You’ll also see the output shows the contacts that have been created – you can use standard Powershell pipeling to export this data, pipe it to another command or filter it.

The second example is slightly more complicated, and reflects the main use case. We’re connecting to a remote exchange organisation, using Autodiscover to find the EWS address, enabling impersonation and providing credentials at the command line:

In addition to the options above, you can also specify the parameters -Exchange2007 $true and use -EWSManagedApiDLLFilePath to specify a different path the the EWS DLL.

Powershell Code

Finally, you’ll need a copy of the code to do all this. At the bottom of the post you’ll find a ZIP file containing the Import-MailboxContacts.ps1 file and a sample CSV file, and below you’ll see the code itself. Happy importing!

Download as ZIP

The main problem with Export-Mailbox for most Exchange administrators is the requirement for Outlook – either on a 32-bit machine with Management Tools for Exchange 2007, or on a 64-bit machine for Exchange 2010. All in all, it wasn’t ideal and certainly didn’t facilitate scripted mailbox exports.

Thankfully, with Exchange 2010 SP1, Export-Mailbox is going the way of the dodo and new cmdlets for Mailbox imports and exports are available. Just like the New-MoveRequest cmdlet, the new import/export command use the Mailbox Replication Service to perform the move via one of the Client Access Servers giving performance benefits, such as ensuring the PST transfer doesn’t have to go via the machine with the Exchange Management Tools/Outlook installed, as was the case previously.

The main aim of this post is to give you an overview of how to use the new mailbox export cmdlets, and then show you how to put them to practical use, both at the command line and with a scheduled task for brick-level backups.

Getting it set up

The basic requirements for using the new feature are pretty straightforward. You need to use an account that’s a member of the organisational management groups, and have the “Mailbox Import Export” role assignment assigned to you or a role group you’re a member of. As the export is done at a CAS server (and if you’ve multiple CAS servers you can’t specify which one in each site will be used) you can’t specify a local drive letter and path – you must specify a UNC path to a network share that the “Exchange Trusted Subsystem” group has read/write access to.

Step One

Create a share on a server, and grant Exchange Trusted Subsystem read/write permission. In this example I’m using a share called Exports on a test server called Azua in my lab environment:

Step Two

Next, you’ll need to grant a user, or group, the Mailbox Import Export role assignment. You can do this using the Exchange Management shell with a single command. In this example, I’m granting my lab domain’s Administrator user the role assignment:

After you’ve done this, close and re-open the Exchange Management shell, and you’re ready to go!

Exporting a Mailbox

At it’s simplest, use the New-MailboxExportRequest command with the –Mailbox parameter, to specify the mailbox to export along with the –FilePath parameter, to specify the PST file to create and export data to, e.g:

In addition, there are some other useful options – such as –BatchName, which allows grouping of requests together, and –ContentFilter, which allows only certain content to be exported to the PST – useful for discovery purposes.  As usual, use the Get-Help New-MailboxExportRequest –detailed command to review the full plethora of options.

After submission of your requests, you can check progress, including the percentage complete, with the two Get-MailboxExportRequest and the Get-MailboxExportRequestStatistics commands. Pipe the former into the latter to get a listing:

After the requests complete, you can remove the requests in a similar fashion, using the Remove-MailboxExportRequest command:

Performing mass exports

One benefit of Powershell is it’s very easy to put together commands enabling mass-exports of PST data with only a few commands. If you really wanted to, you could even use a Powershell script as a secondary brick-level backup!

The Basics

So to check out how to do this, let’s look at it’s simplest – backing up all the mailboxes (assuming it’s a full Exchange 2010 environment) to a single share:

In the above example, we’re simply performing a for-each loop through each mailbox and creating a new Mailbox Export Request, using the alias to build the name for the PST.

But – what if we’re in a mixed environment, and only want to target the Exchange 2010 mailboxes?

In this example above, now, we’ve added a clause to only select the mailboxes where the Exchange Major Build is 14 – Exchange 2010. Simple!

Moving on from such wide-targeting, you may want to target just a pre-defined list, using a CSV file. To do this, simply create a CSV file with the column “Alias”, and list the Mailbox alias fields you wish to export. Then, using the Import-CSV command we can use this CSV file to create the requests:

Performing Mass Exports as a scheduled task

Now you’ve seen the basics of how easy it is to perform mass mailbox exports using the New-MailboxExportRequest command, I’ll finish off with a final example showing how to use this mass export feature as part of a scheduled task.

This script is aimed at backing up all the mailboxes on a single database, or a single server. After creating the requests, it waits for the requests to complete then, if you’ve specified a report directory, it will write reports showing completed and incomplete (i.e. failed!) requests. Finally it removes the requests it created.

To use the script, you need to alter the config section and specify either a server or a database, a share to export to, a share to write a report to after the process has completed and you can choose whether to remove each mailbox’s associated PST file or leave as-is at each export – merging the contents.

You’ll see the content of the script below and at the bottom of the post I’ve zipped it up along with a bootstrap CMD file you could use when setting up a schedule task. As always – use at your own risk and test out in your lab environment first. Happy Exporting!

Command file contents:

Download as ZIP

If you don’t have the resources and time to install the SP1 beta yourself, or just want a quick look at all the new themes that will be included in the upcoming service pack, this quick post is for you!

Default

Mixxer

Botanical

One World

Super Sparkle Happy

It Came From Space

Autumn Blade

Herding Cats

Finger Paints

Damask

Arctic

Cupcake

Blibbet

Gothitech

Winterland

Pink

Blue

Green

Voilet

Grey

Installing Exchange 2010 SP1 Beta (Mike Crowley's Whiteboard)

RBAC Database Scopes in Exchange Server 2010 SP1 Beta (Mike Pfeiffer's Blog)

Installing Exchange 2010 Pre-requisites Made Part Of The SP1 Beta Setup Process… (How Exchange Works)

Archive Mailbox Improvements In Exchange 2010 SP1 Beta… (How Exchange Works)

And of course there's a few more older articles linked at the Technet Wiki