This past week I worked with some customers who were getting started with using PowerShell against Exchange Online as part of their new Office 365 solution.  As you may know Exchange is not my primary focus area but since these customers’ needs centered around PowerShell I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn more.  What soon became apparent to me was a few things:

• The output / objects returned from Exchange Online vs. on-premises commandlets sometimes differ (mainly due to Exchange Online output needing to be serialized across the wire)
• Some of the community scripts posted on TechNet Script Center or PoSH Code Repository that work for on-premises won’t work against Exchange Online due to the above
• I went to multiple resources to get an introduction of using the Exchange Online commandlets

   In light of the last item I would like to share some resources I gathered for getting started with the Exchange Online commandlets.  I will address the first two items in a follow up post that shows one sample script that I helped a customer fix.

Links

Using PowerShell with Office365

http://blah.winsmarts.com/2011-4-Using_PowerShell_with_Office365.aspx

Administering Microsoft Office 365 using WIndows PowerShell

http://blog.powershell.no/2011/05/09/administering-microsoft-office-365-using-windows-powershell/

Reference to Available PowerShell Cmdlets in Exchange Online

http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd575549.aspx

Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Office 365

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh125002.aspx

Role Based Access Control in Exchange Online

http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd207274.aspx

Exchange Online and RBAC

http://blogs.technet.com/b/ilvancri/archive/2011/05/16/exchange-online-office365-and-rbac.aspx

Conclusion

   Office 365 is being integrated into more and more customers’ environments.  While your PowerShell skills can still be used to manage certain portions of Office 365 (Exchange Online as of the time of this writing) there are a few differences in how data is passed back and forth.  Hopefully the links above will get you started on scripting against  cloud based services.

      -Frog Out