SamCogan.com

Posts Tagged ‘Exchange’

New site for Exchange Control Panel

Thursday, August 13th, 2009


I’ve created a CodePlex site for the Open Source Exchange Control Panel Project (got to get a better name!). Theres not much on it at the moment but hopefully it will give people who are interested the chance to express their interest and start some discussion.

Its located at http://ecp.codeplex.com/

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Open Source Exchange Control Panel – Part II

Saturday, August 8th, 2009


As you may have seen in a previous post, I have been working on developing a control panel for Microsoft Exchange. This was done as part of my University dissertation; It was completed back in May, and obviously did well as it got me a First.

This control panel was aimed at small businesses with no IT departments, and uses PowerShell as the backend to communicate with Exchange. This works great in small, low use environments. However when you start getting multiple users, using it a lot PowerShell becomes a bottleneck. I’ve since learned that using the HMC interface, or other Exchange API is probably better suited to this, and I want to look at doing this.

There are a number of control panels that cater for Exchange out there now, and I’m sure do it better than I could, so I’m not pursing this project to try and sell it and compete with them, I think the community needs a good, open source control panel for Exchange that lets small companies administer Exchange easily, whether its for use in the office, or hosting companies that want to start offering hosted exchange services, but can’t afford the exorbitant charges for other control panels, on top of there Exchange licenses.

It may be that the code I already have is no good, that we need to start again and re-think the whole design (in fact I think its quite likely, the code was produced by myself, with no outside input, thank you university supervisors for that), but what I have already gained from this project is knowledge, about the inner workings of Exchange, that can be used to go forward.

So I’m looking for help, from anyone who wants to get involved with a creating a simple, easy to use, Open Source control Panel for Exchange 2007, and maybe even getting in first for Exchange 2010. I’ll donate whatever code I have that is useful, but anyone involved in this would be on an equal footing, everyone’s ideas are worthwhile and I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who know more about this than me.

So, if you’re interested in joining and getting this project going, send me an email, mail [@] samcogan dot com, or leave a comment here. Hopefully there are some others who are as interested and excited about this as I am.

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64bit Conversion

Sunday, February 8th, 2009


So I’ve been developing my project application on a 32 bit Exchange 2007 server. You can’t buy 32bit Exchange 2007, but you can download a 90 day trial of it for testing, and as my decrepit old server I have for developing on is firmly stuck in 32 bit land, I used that.

Now that my application is working well I decided I ought to test in a 64bit environment, so I set about setting up a virtual server to test it on, and as .net should compile for all processors, I deployed my app.

It didn’t work. I was getting errors that basically translated to dll’s I was using being 32 bit, I expected this, I was using 32bit PowerShell and exchange dll’s so I was expecting to need to change these, but it was a dll I’d not used in the project, Interop.CertClientLib.dll.

So I spent some time searching to see if I could a. find out what this dll was for and b. where I could find a 64bit version, but with no luck on either account. So I gave up and decided to see what would happen if I removed this dll… It all worked fine.

So the moral of this story, know what your dll’s are doing, and if you’re using them!
So other than that, deployment in a 64bit environment was very smooth.

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