Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Open Source Server-Side Lite Holiday cmdlet for Exchange

Holidays in Exchange.

The words send shivers down my spine.

We got our first request for a tool to insert holidays server-side after we did a migration for the folks at HMS (shout out to you guys!) for Exchange 2003.  That was CDO-based tech, with its positives and negatives.

After Exchange 2007 came out we re-wrote the tool for Exchange Web Services  (EWS), added a variety of features and found that folks really wanted it, but not at enterprise licensing levels.  Go figure.

But it's a good way of showing what we can do with calendars in migrations, so we've produced an open-sourced lite version of a holiday cmdlet.

Sample code where we build the holiday looks like this:


So you can find the CodePlex project at sumatra.codeplex.com.

We've also hard-coded a few things (like, it's picking up your credentials to authenticate against Exchange, so you ARE the service account!).





We think of this more as a mini-tutorial on how to do a calendar-centric cmdlet.

Why a lite version and not the full thing?

Mainly because the full version has a lot of expertise behind it that we're reticent to just give to those of you toiling out there on software knock-offs.  

Where from here?

We are market-driven.  We're keeping an eye on what we hear back.

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