Working with Active Directory Dates

Recently, my friend and colleague asked me about how to limit an ldap search to only return objects that were created after a certain date. 'whenCreated' should be a logical choice to solve that. However, this attribute has an interesting format, see this reference. So, i marked up a few functions to help us work with the date naturally within Powershell.

function ConvertToAdDate([DateTime]$date) {
   "{0:0000}{1:00}{2:00}{3:00}{4:00}{5:00}.0Z" -f $date.year,$date.month, `
           $date.day, $date.Hour, $date.Minute, $date.Second
}
function ConvertFromAdDate([String] $date) {
   $pattern = `
      '^(?<year>\d{4})(?<month>\d{2})(?<day>\d{2})(?<hrs>\d{2})`
              (?<min>\d{2})(?<sec>\d{2})\.0Z$'
   $match = [regex]::Match($date,$pattern)
   if ($match.success) {
       $result = New-Object System.DateTime($match.groups["year"].value,`
           $match.groups["month"].value,$match.groups["day"].value,`
           $match.groups["hrs"].value,$match.groups["min"].value, `
           $match.groups["sec"].value,[DateTimeKind]::Utc)
       $result.ToLocalTime()
   } else {
       $null
   }
}

Purging Mailboxes In Exchange 2003

I have recently demonstrated how to Purge a mailbox in Exchange 2007 but did not show anything for Exchange 2003. Here is what I do to purge mailboxes on Exchange 2003 server.

$list = gwmi -ComputerName "ex2k3srv" -Class Exchange_Mailbox -Namespace Root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 | ?{ $_.DateDiscoveredAbsentInDS -ne $null }
$list | %{ $_.Purge() }

For IT admins and Sales guys!!!

It's been all over the web. Still, I need to post this link b/c I'll be coming back to it for entertainment for awhile.

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html

Purging Mailboxes in Exchange 2007

We all know how vastly different Exchange 2007 Management Console (EMC) is from Exchange System Manager (ESM) in Exchange 2003. The other day I had to test a migration for work and realized that I no longer have an easy ability to purge mailboxes through EMC just like I used to in ESM:

Under the hood, selecting Purge in ESM calls Exchange_Mailbox.Purge method.
In Exchange 2007, WMI is gone. So Powershell comes to the rescue.
After reviewing "Remove-Mailbox" reference at TechNet, it sounds like "-Permanent" should be piped when removing the user and that's it. However, things are not that simple.
If mailbox is already disassociated, then I can query a list of disconnected mailboxes like this:

Get-MailboxStatistics | ?{ $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null}

Now, I need to pipe the "Remove-Mailbox", but which parameters do I choose?
It took me some mocking around but it turns out this is what you need:

Get-MailboxStatistics | ?{ $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null} | `
 %{ Remove-Mailbox -Database "Mailbox Database" `
    -StoreMailboxIdentity $_.MailboxGuid -WhatIf:$false}