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Identity

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Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 will reach end of support on April 11, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

 

Applies to: Exchange Server 2007, Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Exchange Server 2007 SP2, Exchange Server 2007 SP3

The Identity parameter is a special parameter that you can use with most cmdlets. The Identity parameter gives you access to the unique identifiers that refer to a particular object in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. This lets you perform actions on a specific Exchange 2007 object.

The primary unique identifier of an object is always a GUID. A GUID is a 128-bit identifier, such as 63d64005-42c5-4f8f-b310-14f6cb125bf3. This GUID never repeats and is therefore always unique. However, you don't want to type such GUIDs regularly. Therefore the Identity parameter typically also consists of the values of other parameters, or combined set of values from multiple parameters on a single object. These are also guaranteed to be unique across that set of objects. You can specify the values of these other parameters, such as Name and DistriguishedName, or they can be system-generated. The additional parameters that are used, if any, and how they are populated, depend on the object you refer to.

The Identity parameter is also considered a positional parameter. The first argument on a cmdlet is assumed to be the Identity parameter when no parameter label is specified. This reduces the number of keystrokes when you type commands.

For more information about positional parameters, see Parameters.

The following example shows the use of the Identity parameter by using the Receive connector's unique Name parameter value. This example also shows how you can omit the Identity parameter name because Identity is a positional parameter.

Get-ReceiveConnector -Identity "From the Internet"
Get-ReceiveConnector "From the Internet"

Like all objects in Exchange 2007, this Receive connector can also be referred to by its unique GUID. For example, if the Receive connector named "From the Internet" is also assigned the GUID 63d64005-42c5-4f8f-b310-14f6cb125bf3, you can also retrieve the Receive connector by using the following command:

Get-ReceiveConnector 63d64005-42c5-4f8f-b310-14f6cb125bf3

Examples of the Identity Parameter

The examples in this section refer to the delivery status notification (DSN) messages that can be configured in an Exchange 2007 organization. The first example shows how to retrieve DSN 5.4.1 by using the Get-SystemMessage cmdlet. In the Get-SystemMessage cmdlet, the Identity parameter consists of several pieces of data that are configured on each DSN message object. These pieces of data include the language that the DSN is written in, whether the DSN is internal or external in scope, and the DSN message code as in the following example:

Get-SystemMessage en\internal\5.4.1

You can also retrieve this DSN message by using its GUID as in the following example, because all objects in Exchange 2007 have a GUID:

Get-SystemMessage 82ca7bde-1c2d-4aa1-97e1-f298a6f10222

For more information about the makeup of the Identity parameter when it is used with the SystemMessage cmdlets, see DSN Message Identity.

The examples described in this topic illustrate how the Identity parameter can accept different unique values to refer to specific objects in the Exchange 2007 organization. These examples also illustrate how the Identity parameter label can be omitted to reduce the number of keystrokes when you type commands.