Schedule your Exchange 2010 scripts

If you’re running Exchange you most likely want to run script on a regular basis.

Here is how you schedule a Exchange 2010 management shell script.

Copy your script file into a folder of your choice. ex. c:\script\script.ps1

The most tricky part is how to actually start the powershell script to run. This is set on the actions tab.
Create new action with “start a program” and for program/script enter the path to powershell.exe
%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe

for the argument textbox, enter
-Command “. 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\bin\RemoteExchange.ps1'; Connect-ExchangeServer -auto; C:\script\script.ps1”

The RemoteExchange.ps1 is the script that start a remote Exchange 2010 Management shell session to an Exchange 2010 server. The last part is the path to your script.

Several settings on the job depends on what your script does.
You might need to run the script highest privileges, Configure for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 etc.

If you know that your script normally take 5 min to run, it’s a good practice to use settings to either stop if it runs for a long time and also block multiple instances to run at the same time.

Another handy thing you can include in your script is actually to make the Exchange snapin to load from the script instead of having the task load it.
Here is an example.

# some Exchange script
# bla bla.

# Load the Exchange snapin if it's no already present.
function LoadExchangeSnapin
{
    if (! (Get-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010 -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue) )
    {
        Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010 -ErrorAction:Stop
    }
}


# The meat of the script!
&{

    "*** some Exchange Script started ***" >> scriptlogfile.log
    [DateTime]::Now >> scriptlogfile.log

    # Load the Exchange cmdlets.
    & LoadExchangeSnapin

    # the rest of the script

    [DateTime]::Now >> scriptlogfile.log
    "*** some Exchange Script ended ***" >> scriptlogfile.log
}

Powershell multi-value attributes

Now and then you encounter that you must handle multivalued properties in Exchange Management Shell (EMS). This can be a little tricky of you don’t know how to do this.

I will give some examples to highlight different syntaxes you can use. I will use the attribute RemoteIPRanges on ReceiveConnector but examples can be used on any multi-value attribute.

Adding some IP ranges. This will overwrite every IP range already present.
Set-ReceiveConnector <Connector name> -RemoteIPRanges "192.168.10.10", "192.168.10.11"

List multivalued properties.
Get-ReceiveConnector <Connector name>).RemoteIPRanges

Adding additional IP. This is completed by first save the range array into $range variable. Adding values to the $range variable and then write the info in $range variable to the receiveconnector.

$range = (Get-ReceiveConnector <Connector name>).RemoteIPRanges

$range += "192.168.10.12"


Set-ReceiveConnector <Connector name> -RemoteIPRanges $range

You can also remove entries from the array with the same method as adding.

$range -= "192.168.10.12"

Because you have all entries in the $range variable you can do things like copy ranges from one connector to another one.

$range = (Get-ReceiveConnector <Connector name>).RemoteIPRanges

Set-ReceiveConnector <another Connector name> -RemoteIPRanges $range