Customer Reviews

Exchange Management Shell: TFM

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One of the challenges of Windows Powershell, and the Exchange Management Shell in particular, is that there are a dizzying array of commands, and those commands have a dizzying array of options and switches. You can get a list of them by typing "get-help" and the command name (e.g., "get-help ActiveSync" and from the list of ActiveSync cmdlets, type "get-help set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy" and you'll get a long but cryptic list of switches. "get-help set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy -detailed" gives you a more detailed list of the parameters and what they mean (which scrolls conveniently off the top of your screen) but which also leaves a lot to the imagination. "Get-help set-ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy -examples" gives you one or two examples of how it might be actually used.
Typically, entering a Command Shell command with its line or more of parameters results in half a dozen (or more) failures, because one or another item was slightly wrong, or was not in quotes (or was IN quotes.)
So, what I thought I needed was a sort of encyclopedia, with tables of what the various Shell commands and their parameters meant. To avoid the Russian Roulette of typing the commands and seeing what happens to my live server.
This is NOT that book. It's fairly thin, and has the same long lists of parameters, somewhat easier to read than the on-screen version, but with no real additional information. Whole pages of the book appear to be screen dumps of the information that EMS provides.
in sum, this book has not proved much use to me. Perhaps if you had no other resource (like the Technet website) it would be worthwhile.

I've purchased a number of PowerShell books and this is by far the best of the lot. Admittedly Exchange is my primary focus and this book does a great job as a reference resource. It's not necessarily a cookbook of pre-canned scripts to execute particular tasks, but rather a reference for building those tasks. The day after I got the book I went to it 3 times for answers to real world questions and found the answer each time.