Whats new in Windows 2016 Directory Services

Whats new in Windows 2016 Directory Services

Windows 2016 will be released later this year and along with it a few additions will be added to the Directory Services piece. Below are a few of the notable additions that i am looking forward to.

New Features
1. Group Membership Expiration - You will be able to add a user to a group for a certain period of          time. The one drawback is this feature requires windows server 2016 functional level.
2. Azure AD Join -
3. Deprecation of the File Replication service
4. Deprecation of Windows Server 2003 Functional Level

Deleting Message from Exchange Mailboxes with Powershell

From time to time it may become necessary to search a users mailbox for a message or delete a specific message from a mailbox. Below are a few powershell commands you can use with Exchange 2010 to search a mailbox for a particular email message.



Delete All Messages with a specific subject
get-mailbox -identity "SOURCEMAILBOX" -resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox -SearchQuery "Subject:"SUBJECTSTRING"" -DeleteContent

Delete All messages with a specific attachment
get-mailbox -identity "SOURCEMAILBOX" -resultsize unlimited | search-mailbox -SearchQuery "attachment:FILENAME.DOCX" -DeleteContent

Search Mailbox by subject and date and copy the message out of the source mailbox into the targetmailbox
get-mailbox -identity "SOURCEMAILBOX" -resultsize unlimited |  search-mailbox -SearchQuery "subject:""SUBJECTSTRING"" Sent:"MMDDYYYY" -TargetMailbox DESTINATIONMAILBOX -TargetFolder TARGETFOLDER –LogOnly -LogLevel Full

Search Mailbox by subject and date and copy the message out of the source mailbox into the targetmailbox and then delete the email from source mailbox
get-mailbox -identity "SOURCEMAILBOX" -resultsize unlimited |  search-mailbox -SearchQuery "subject:"SUBJECTSTRING" Sent:"MMDDYYYY" -TargetMailbox DESTINATIONMAILBOX -TargetFolder TARGETFOLDER –LogOnly -LogLevel Full -deletecontent

Managing Local Administrator Passwords on Windows Workstations

Microsoft offers the Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) to allow administrators to set random and unique passwords on each workstation/server joined to active directory. This tool works by installing a small application on the client machine and then configuring a GPO to apply the specific settings for the password format and expiration intervals. Below are the steps required to configure LAPS.


Server Setup 

1. Download LAPS from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3062591
2. Run the install on your management workstations and select the three items under the management tools and select next to complete the install.
3. Next run the following command to extend the schema to add the ms-Mcs-AdmPwd & ms-Mcs-AdmPwdExpiration attributes to the computer objects class

4. Next run the following command to set the permission to allow the computer account to update itself and allow domain admins to reset the password.