So, over the weekend I converted one of my clients into our Exchange in the Cloud solution. Their server was a old as can be 2003 SBS server (yuck!), so getting them off this server was waaay overdue.

Two weeks ago the client’s exchange server reported over 45GB of space used with just 14 accounts! So cleaning it up, on friday after the exchange store purged the trash bins, their store was reporting only 20GB of data. Fantastic! So I exported all of the users outlook profiles from their respective Outlook clients.

With their fantastic DSL, I had to calculate about 40% of the data be kept locally to upload to our servers and the other 60% would come with me to upload to our servers, then import straight into their accounts once in our cloud.

That is where this post goes to give the awesome it’s name. I had been trying to get an outlook client setup in one of our Farm’s, however I kept getting an error relating to the Global address list not being found for the user. Since I knew that I was able to setup the accounts locally on the client’s machines, I looked for another way to import into the client’s account.

In exchange 2010, I remembered that there was an export and import exchange cmdlet that allowed my to do just that, import and export, but it did have some issues with that process. Looking up to see if they (Microsoft) had expanded the functionality, I was overjoyed (and I do mean OVERJOYED) to find out that not only had they kept the functionality, they had expanded it to be an autonomous system that as soon as you tell the system to import, it queues it and does it!

Pretty cool huh? I thought so.. The only thing you need to be aware of is that the following command needs to be run to enable your admin account the ability to import and export by default (it is not enabled by default, most likely a security restriction so that you don’t have random people adding random PST files to the accounts on your servers).

Command for exchange cmdlet:
New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role “Mailbox Import Export” -User “DOMAIN\administrator”

This will enable the following to the Admin Menu:

The import process is slick, it will ask you for the location of the shared PST file, from there it asks you what email to send the notifications to (note, even if you remove admin, it still sends it to the admin account..), and viola, you’re done! I Queued up 5 accounts and within 5 hours it was completed.

So.. not so much a rant, just a props to Microsoft for actually doing something right and making a script that does what it’s supposed to without issue..

Till Next time..

-B