I’m pleased to announce that my latest Pluralsight course, Managing Exchange Mailboxes and Distribution Groups in PowerShell, has emerged from the production cycle and is now available to watch.
I enjoyed creating this course because it brings together the two technologies that have had the most impact on my career to date – Exchange Server, and PowerShell. In some respects, Exchange admins had a head start on the rest of the IT pro community because of Exchange Server 2007, a product that coincidentally is reaching end of life in just a few days time. As I explained in my blog post, Why PowerShell, it was working with Exchange that pushed me into learning how to use PowerShell.
I was supporting far more users and servers than I ever had before, and I realized there was no way I could keep up without the help of scripting and automation. And that meant a lot of time writing PowerShell. Automation became critical to our team’s ability to perform our duties, as our head count shrank but our responsibilities grew. Doing “more with less” was the reality we were dealing with.
Not much has changed today. PowerShell is a critical skill for IT pros who work with Microsoft technologies. We see it in job ads, and there are strong communities built around sharing of PowerShell scripts and code. And quite a lot of the most popular blog posts here either relate to using PowerShell for an administration task, or have a PowerShell solution for a problem.
Which brings us to my new course with Pluralsight. When I created this course I had two types of people in mind:
- An IT pro who has Exchange admin responsibilities, but is inexperienced with PowerShell. Exchange Server is a great way to learn about PowerShell, and this course is suitable for beginners (I make a few recommendations in the first module for some introductory content to go watch first, if you need it).
- An IT pro comfortable with PowerShell, but new to Exchange administration. If that is you, then you can either watch the course from start to finish, or you can dip into specific lessons to learn the tasks you need.
In either case, if you also need a test lab environment to learn in, you can build one on two VMs following the lab setup guide that’s included with the course, or just grab a free copy of my Exchange Server 2016 Quick Start Guide.
The complete list of modules, which total just over 3 hours of content, are:
- Module 1 – Course introduction
- Module 2 – Managing user mailboxes
- Module 3 – Managing shared mailboxes and delegate scenarios
- Module 4 – Managing resource mailboxes
- Module 5 – Managing archive mailboxes
- Module 6 – Other mailbox management scenarios
- Module 7 – Managing distribution groups
- Module 8 – Reporting and automation
If you’re a Pluralsight subscriber you can find the course here. If you’re not already a Pluralsight subscriber, you can sign up for a free trial to watch this course and others for 30 days.
