Exchange cmdlet: Get-User

Hello!

Its been a bit since I posted last mainly because I was out on vacations. I been back for a few days now but it had been a bit uneventful. Until today when I was tasked with creating a termination script for over 300 users. I was provided with a list and started working on writing a script that followed our procedures. I don't think I can go into details for privacy reasons but we make some changes to the settings on our Exchange side when we terminate the user, and i noticed that some of the users that I was provided were not Mailbox users but MailUsers and they even threw a few MailContacts in there too.

The command Get-Mailbox does not work for MailUsers or MailContact and they each have their own. I did some digging around to try to find the best way to identify the type of mailbox they are before trying to use the 'Get-' or the 'Set-' commands but I wasn't able to find much. I even reviewed all of the properties for Get-ADUser and Get-ADObject hoping to find anything that would identify all three of them without having to write extra code - I don't normally like to try to write extra code unless I believe its completely necessary. Unfortunately none of it brought me the answer I was seeking.

It wasn't until I was going through the cmdlets that are added with the Exchange Add-in that I found the cmdlet 'Get-User'. I been writing PowerShell for over 2 years now, and quite franky I've never had never seen this particular cmdlet, but it really did made everything so much easier.

Syntax:

Get-User [-Identity <UserIdParameter>] <COMMON PARAMETERS>

Get-User [-Anr <String>] <COMMON PARAMETERS>

COMMON PARAMETERS: [-AccountPartition <AccountPartitionIdParameter>] 
                   [-Arbitration <SwitchParameter>] 
                   [-AuditLog <SwitchParameter>] 
                   [-ConsumerNetID <NetID>] 
                   [-Credential <PSCredential>] 
                   [-DomainController <Fqdn>] 
                   [-Filter <String>] 
                   [-IgnoreDefaultScope <SwitchParameter>] 
                   [-Organization <OrganizationIdParameter>] 
                   [-OrganizationalUnit <OrganizationalUnitIdParameter>] 
                   [-PublicFolder <SwitchParameter>] 
                   [-ReadFromDomainController <SwitchParameter>] 
                   [-RecipientTypeDetails <RecipientTypeDetails[]>] 
                   [-ResultSize <Unlimited>] 
                   [-SoftDeletedUser <SwitchParameter>] 
                   [-SortBy <String>]

Source

The regular output is:

PS C:\> get-user Jonatan.Bernal

Name                                                            RecipientType
----                                                                 -------------
Jonatan Bernal                                              UserMailbox

It can if you format-list you get the full object: Deserialized.Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.Management.User

The information provided is quite thorough and I don't have to bother what type of  mailbox it is which quite frankly I find very useful to only use 1 cmdlet and use the other ones only when they are needed.

I hope that this might help someone out there.

Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know if this was helpful or know any other interesting cmdlets!

Kind regards,
Me

Update: well it was pointed out to me by +Lincoln Reedy that the cmdlet that I shared about would unfortunately not work for MailContacts, which again can be a problem. He also shared with me the cmdlet 'Get-Recepient' which would work for any type of object. I haven't quite worked much with this new cmdlet yet, so I'm still doing some research because I saw that you can use an authentication type of federation, so I'm wondering if you can actually get recipients outside of your organization. I'll update when I have more information on this.