Test Layout

The default permissions for all users to another user's calendar is AvailabilityOnly . This permission allows you to see that a user is busy, but it does not allow you to see the subject or other information. This permission is just enough that you can use free/busy searching for meeting requests. In some cases, you might want to make the subject available. Specifically, for resource mailboxes, it may be useful. In the default configuration, meetings in the calendar of a resource mailbox contain the name of the person that organized the meeting, but not the original subject of the meeting. By allowing users to see the subject of meetings for a resource mailbox, you are allowing them to see who organized the meeting. The permission to use for showing meeting subjects is LimitedDetails . The command to set this permission on a resource mailbox named Room100 is shown below: Set-MailboxFolderPermission Room100:\Calendar -User Default -AccessRights LimitedDetails

If you are doing a large amount of PowerShell scripting then it is likely you have created functions that you want to reuse between scripts. You can copy and paste a function from one script to another to reuse it, but this creates maintenance issues. If you modify the function to improve it, then you need to update many scripts. To centralize management of functions, you can create a single PowerShell script that contains all of the functions. Then you load the script containing the functions from within other scripts before you call the functions. To load the functions script, use dot sourcing like this: . .\functions.ps1 The example above loads functions.ps1 from the same directory as the script that you ran. You can also specify a full path such as: . C:\functions.ps1 You can also use a variable as part of the path: . $ScriptPath\functions.ps1 Another alternative is to create multiple PowerShell scripts that you call as needed from within your script. Effectively, you would be trea

PowerShell 2.0 introduces PowerShell remoting. PowerShell remoting allows you to run cmdlets or scripts on a remote server. For example, you can have one central server that hosts scripts. From the console of that server, you can then run the locally stored script on multiple servers. In the words of the man who taught me that instructors don't need to read from a book (Bob Vergidis): What does this buy me? Using PowerShell remoting buys you: The ability to centralize maintenance of your scripts A central location to schedule scripts to run as tasks The ability to create a script that performs actions on multiple servers even if the cmdlets do not have an option to specify a remote computer In order to use PowerShell remoting, three things need to be in place: Configure the WinRM service to create a listener Make sure that the WinRM starts automatically Configure the firewall to allow communication with WinRM (port 5985) The easiest way to enable PowerShell remoting on a specific c

Let's start with a brief explanation of S/MIME.... S/MIME is a method used to encrypt and digitally sign email messages. Encryption  prevents unauthorized users from reading the message. A digital signature ensures that the message was sent by an identified person. To implement S/MIME, both the send and receiver must have digital certificates. Each certificate has a public key and a private key. For the process to work properly between User A and User B, each user needs to have a copy of the other's public key. For example, User A needs to have a copy of User B's public key. The certificates for S/MIME can be generated internally by an IT department if a certification authority is configured. Alternatively, you can buy certificates from a number of providers for $10-$15 each. The providers that sell certificates verify your identity so that they are trusted by external recipients. The one bit of good news is that you can get a free personal certificate for S/MIME from http:

Like many of my posts, this falls in the category of neat, but I'm not sure very useful to anyone else. Today in my PowerShell class, students were finding it difficult to read the errors displayed by the projector. The room was fairly bright and read was difficult to read. To fix it, I changed the colors with the following code: $colors=(get-host).privatedata $colors.ErrorBackgroundColor="white" $colors.ErrorForegroundColor="black" If you want to display all of the options that you can set, use the following code: $colors=(get-host).privatedata $colors

Let me say, that I should have known better than to buy white box. It's just never as smooth as a brand name box that supports the specific OS that you want. In this case, my excuse was I was in a hurry an needed hardware sooner rather than later. However, the install process on this thing cost me about half a day. On the off chance that anyone else struggles with this, here is my story..... Hardware: ASUS P9X79 Pro motherboard The good news is that this motherboard supports up to 64 GB of RAM which was my primary concern for this test box. Under normal circumstances, I'm not worried about drivers because Windows 7 drivers work in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (the OS I'm using for Hyper-V and virtual machines). My main problem was actually the way that ASUS distributes drivers. They have a special AsusSetup utility with an INI file that defines which files to use for various operating systems. I'm guessing that it works well for most people, but AsusSetup was detecting my

I recently cheaped out and bought a whitebox server to use for my virtual machine test environment. During installation of Windows 2008 R2, it needed the RAID drivers. I didn't put a lot of time into testing this, but most of the time the drivers need to be on a floppy disk (at least they did for earlier operations systems). The motherboard documentation said I needed to get a USB floppy drive. My alternative was to go into the BIOS of the new system, go into the USB settings, and force the attached USB drive with the storage drivers to be seen as a floppy. Normally, the USB storage autodetects, and a large drive like a 8 GB USB drive will be seen as mass storage. I was able to browse to the drivers of the USB drive and all was good.