This product review reflects my own views on this product and as such reflect my opinion. While some product documentation has been consulted for the sake of clarity, none of it has been reproduced for the sake of this review

In parts 1 and two of this series, I covered the basics of how to start getting Exchange specific information easily out of the WMI classes specific to Exchange using PowerShell.

This product review reflects my own views on this product and as such reflect my opinion. While some GFI product documentation has been consulted for the sake of clarity, none of it has been reproduced wholesale for the sake of this review.

There are many providers to choose from when it comes to Hosted Microsoft Exchange. Prices vary, but most of the features are pretty standard today. Just make sure they have all the additional features you need, such as ActiveSync, Blackberry Wireless Sync, Good Mobile Messaging, SharePoint etc..

Do you ever dare to leave your home with doors open? Probably not! The same goes with our company network, if you do not have a properly configured firewall. Also, if you do not give any importance for security in your messaging infrastructure, the impact will be severe too. In other words, mail server will get exposed highly to the very bad “animals” such as Trojans & Viruses.

If you do a quick check with IP pro community on their favorite Microsoft product, most of the time you may get this answer - Messaging & Collaboration or specifically MS Exchange server; eventually this could be Unified Communications as the Office communications server advances to its next level. Literally, no direct competition for MS Exchange Server.

It follows the success of the previous LOVE 2007 event we had in April 2007. In case you haven’t heard about the previous event, here’s where you can read about it.

This product review reflects my own views on this product and as such reflect my opinion. While some GFI product documentation has been consulted for the sake of clarity, none of it has been reproduced for the sake of this review.

I'm going to start off with by referring to an Exchange 2000 article called Automating Exchange 2000 Management with Windows Script Host, since it set's the scene quite nicely for WMI based management for Exchange 2000. Exchange 2000 introduced a set of new WMI classes, and Exchange 2003 introduced a few more. PoweShell is renowned as an Exchange 2007 tool, however here were going to learn to use it to manage just about anything that has a MWI provider, with Exchange 2000/3 as my focus for today.

Most folks I talk to have installed Powershell, but not done much with it. Most of these folks also run Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 and don't dream of managing Exchange from anything else but the GUI or VBScript. Point in case, a lot of Exchange 2003 information is available via WMI. Powershell makes WMI information rapidly accessible via the Get-WMiObject, or it's alias gwmi. Aliases are a shortened version of a command and are interchangeable. Makes for quicker typing.