Ben’s Tech Blog

We recently had hundreds of users leave our organization due to a takeover and we needed to remove each user from all of their distribution lists and security groups. Although we wanted to remove the users from all groups, I wanted to ensure that we had a record of what groups they were members of in case we needed to add them back in. The script that I created removes the user from all of their groups, but first records the list of groups they are member of and exports the list into a report file. We’ve already had two cases where we disabled a user and removed them from all groups and was later informed that the user’s termination date had been moved forward so their account needed to be reinstated. The user’s previous group membership listed in the report file made it very easy for us to add them back into the groups that they should belong to while they are still with the company.

I’ve added the script here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm

An interesting summary of the development of the internet over the last 15 years. I finished school and entered the IT industry in 1995/1996 when the internet really began to take off. It’s amazing how the quickly it has evolved. I guess it’s similar to television for my parents’ generation.

Despite being an excellent product, Microsoft Exchange has some limitations when it comes to email management for teams. There are several approaches to implementing a team email delivery/management solution with an ‘out of the box’ Exchange deployment but unfortunately each solution has a drawback.

This topic has been on my mind a fair bit recently as we have been setting up team messaging solutions under a new company structure. In the past I’ve implemented custom form solutions to manage team messages so that all of the desired features are incorporated, however custom forms are not used by this company and they don’t wish to use them moving forward. With that in mind, we had to look at the default solutions and compare their behaviors before making recommendations to the various teams.

The following table illustrates the solutions that we offered to each team with the behavior of the replies to messages that are sent to the team. Interestingly enough, accessing a shared mailbox via OWA was often the best solution for customer service teams that wanted to be able to track their sent items.