Friday 25 March 2011

Exchange 2010 holiday calendar with delegate approval

After a recent migration from dedicated to hosted Exchange 2010 we needed to provide solutions for a few shared public folder calendars, one of which was used for booking holiday. The solution was a resource mailbox with the addition of delegate approval.

This should work with any Exchange 2010 service that supports remote PowerShell access.

The mailbox can be easily created in ECP, although I chose to use PowerShell. I also created a distribution group for the delegates, don’t forget to add members.

New-Mailbox –Name “Holiday” –Room

New-DistributionGroup –Name HolidayAdmins | Set-DistributionGroup -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

I then setup the calendar processing parameters.

Set-CalendarProcessing –Identity “Holiday” –ResourceDelegates “HolidayAdmins”

Set-CalendarProcessing –Identity “Holiday” –AllBookInPolicy $false –AllRequestInPolicy $true –AutomateProcessing AutoAccept –AdditionalResponse “Holiday request has been submitted. Confirmation will be sent separately.” –EnforceSchedulingHorizon $false –AllowConflicts $true

Users can now book holiday by adding the Holiday resource to meeting. Members of the distribution group (managers/HR) will receive a delegated meeting request which can be accepted or declined.

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Daniel Noakes

Monday 21 March 2011

Populating Lync 2010 Contact Lists

Lync does a great job at searching for contacts, as well as displaying team and frequent contacts. If you work for a smaller organisation or a group of people with no particular hierarchy you may want to populate the contact list with a bunch of people for different groups.

Can you believe there doesn’t appear to be a way to do this out of the box. Luckily Microsoft have built a great product with a load of really clever people who can help. Jeff Guillet has posted just a solution on his blog, http://www.expta.com/2011/01/introducing-lyncaddcontacts.html.

With 3 lines I have been able to pre-populate contacts for groups of users.

CScript LyncAddContacts.vbs /backup backup.xml
CScript LyncAddContacts.vbs daniel.noakes@noak.es
CScript LyncAddContacts.vbs /import “OU=noak.es,OU=Microsoft Exchange Hosted Organizations,DC=exchangegeek,DC=com”

Daniel Noakes

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Exchange 2010 SP1 RU3 pulled until BlackBerry issue resolved

If you haven’t already picked up on it, Microsoft have withdrawn Exchange 2010 SP1 RU3 due some problems highlighted with BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Read more from Kevin Allison on The Exchange Team Blog, http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/03/14/exchange-2010-sp1-rollup-3-and-blackberrys-sending-duplicate-messages.aspx

Daniel Noakes

Free BES for Office 365 Users

BPOS and Office 365 users will be getting BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for free based on the information in this slide deck, http://www.slideshare.net/jessiethe3rd/blackberry-now-free-with-bposoffice-365.

I get the impression this will be built on BES 6, as the slide deck makes reference to the service being hosted and managed by RIM. It will probably be the “Express” edition, but the difference between it and the full product a diminishing anyway.

If you have requirement for BES in business you should work with a partner who can develop a complete solution from devices to air-time and app development to hosting.

Daniel Noakes
twitter.com/dannoakes