Monday, May 23, 2011

FIM 2010 R2 News

At Tech Ed Atlanta Brjann Brekkan and Mark Wahl discussed FIM 2010 R2 in a public forum – so here is a lot of info that is now in the public forum.

Mark covered the new items that will come out in R2:

  1. Web Based Password reset (no need for a domain joined computer, no need to install Password Client no need for Active X, support for Firefox)
    1. Although for integration with the GINA (the login screen) you still need to install the FIM Password Reset Client
    2. Have the ability to mark QA gates as executing for everyone or only those coming through the extranet.
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    3. Considering adding Captcha or OTP gates to phones
  2. Reporting
    1. Depends on System Center Data Warehouse (SCDW)
      1. But no separating licensing is required for SCDW
    2. Reports
      1. Membership Change Reports
      2. Object History
        1. Users
        2. Groups
        3. Sets
        4. Requests
        5. Policy Rules (MPRs)
  3. MA – EZ MA – Andreas Kjellman covered this one at TEC

Monday, May 16, 2011

Behind the scenes of RoomResources–Custom Properties

While using FIM and PowerShell to manage Exchange 2010 I was following along a wonderful article on resource mailboxes that left me wondering a few things.

1) Exactly how is the data stored in the msExchResourceDisplay and msExchResourceSearchProperties attributes?

2) How is it stored with multiple custom properties?

3) Is manipulating those AD attributes sufficient or is PowerShell storing something in the Exchange Data store?

Here are the answers:

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1) msExchResourceDisplay = “Room,FlatScreenTV” It appears to be a single valued string with commas.

msExchResourceSearchProperties at first blush appears to be a single-valued string with semi-colons, however further examination reveals it to be a multi-valued attribute

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2) What happens when multiple Resource Custom Properties are set?

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msExchResourceDisplay = “Room,FlatScreenTV,Whiteboard”

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So the new value is simply added to the old ones.

3) Is manipulating these AD attributes sufficient?

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Now the reveal:

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It works!

4) Well I came up with another question – What happens if the AD programmer forgets to manipulate both attributes?

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If it is missing from Display but is in Search

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Then it isn’t visible in the Address Book but a search returns it as a result:

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6) so what if I put MountedProjector back in Display but it is missing from Search?

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It shows up but a search for MountedProjector reveals nothing:

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Whereas as search for Whiteboard:

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