Sometimes you get a sudden need to forward bulk users’ mail to external destination… in normal days, you would create a mail contact, then forward the selected user’s mail to the new external contact.

Now what if you got a large number of contacts to forward? well, you can either:

  1. Manually create all the required mail contacts, then assign each user to each contact.
  2. OR THE BETTER WAY: Use the magic of PowerShell!

This is a very simple and quick procedure…

First, you will need to create the contacts, which you can find how in the following post: PS: Creating bulk mail contacts

Then with another script, you will forward each user to his corresponding mail contact item:

Import-CSV "C:\ContactForward.csv" | Foreach{Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.LocalUser -ForwardingAddress $_.ForwardAddress -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true}

You can either keep the attribute “-DeliverToMailboxAndForward $true” to keep a copy of the message in the original mailbox or remove it.Read the rest “PS: Bulk forwarding mailboxes to external addresses”

Below is a useful script to create bulk contacts in Exchange Management Shell:

Import-CSV "C:\NameList.csv" | Foreach{New-MailContact -Name $_.Name -ExternalEmailAddress $_.ExternalAddress}

You need to have the following prepared before you use the script:

  1. A CSV file contains 2 headers: Name, ExternalAddress, with all the contacts list that you want to create.
  2. Save the CSV file in C:\ (to be completely complied with the script above, otherwise save it where you want, but make sure you specify it’s full path in the script above instead of “C:\NameList.csv”.

To make it a bit easier, here is the script ready, just open EMS and run it from there after you make sure the file is ready…

Bulk-MailContact

I’ve done some migrations recently from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps… While the migration itself went successful, I came across many serious issues that affected the overall satisfaction of the customer…

I tried my best to solve and workaround those issues during the migration process, and it seems everything went well after what I did…

One of the major problems was, the local users were unable to send to the users who got migrated to Google already!, this problem was because of simply because they are still on Exchange server, and the emails they are sending to their colleagues basically never leave Exchange to be routed outside to Google.

One workaround I managed to use was to put the testing domain that Google gives to the Google Apps users to a good use (MAIN_DOMAIN.test-google-a.com)

I have created mail contact item for every user on the Exchange points to … Read the rest “Some points to remember while migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps”