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Exchange 2007 Powershell Answer –The PowerGUI

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Just recently I worked on a project with a customer who migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. It was an InterOrg migration and we used Microsoft native tools to complete it. As any of you pre-Exchange 2007 administrators will appreciate, administration within Exchange 2007 is quite different to 2003 particularly with the introduction and use of Powershell.

As most of you know using powershell is extremely handy when migrating or scripting migrations of mailboxes from one org to another. Also, you have to use powershell to carry out a lot of administration tasks, it is even recommended that when moving resources from one cluster node to another that you use a powershell command to do so rather than the Cluster Admin GUI . As powershell scripting within Exchange is new to alot of us - the customer I was working with was not entirely comfortable with powershell and felt that a GUI interface would be easier to use. I wasn’t sure if there was an alternative or a solution that complimented the powershell commands etc. After some investigation on the web we came upon this site:

https://powergui.org/index.jspa

PowerGUI is a Graphical User Interface which allows you to execute all of the commands you would through powershell only via a GUI – with regard to the customer I worked with – he could pretty much manage Exchange 2007 through a GUI as well as/other than via the powershell cmdlet – which made him very happy.

PowerGui was developed by Dmitry Sotnikov who’s a CTO in the Windows Management group at Quest Software. Straight from the FAQ piece of the PowerGUI web site - PowerGUI is an extensible graphical administrative console for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell. These include Windows OS (XP, 2003, Vista), Exchange 2007, Operations Manager 2007 and other new systems from Microsoft. The tool allows to use the rich capabilities of Windows PowerShell in a familiar and intuitive GUI console. The good news is that the tool is freeware.

Here is an excellent demo of the product specific to Exchange – it will give you an idea of what it is capable of and also the look and feel of it...

https://powergui.org/shares/powergui/sbin/docs/PowerGUI_Introduction/PowerGUI_Introduction.html

There is also a couple of excellent articles on the PowerGUI by Henrik Walther at the following link:

https://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2007/management-administration/managing-exchange-2007-using-powergui-part1.html

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