Import EMS Commands from an Exchange 2010 Server in the Local AD Site

Let's say you want to deploy a PowerShell script to your help desk group that imports the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets using implicit remoting. The benefit to this is it gives your help desk users access to the Exchange cmdlets without having to install the Exchange tools on their machine. Normally, you would have to hard code a server name into this type of script, but in this post we'll look at how you can import the commands automatically from an Exchange sever in the local AD site.

The following code uses the Get-ExchangeServersInSite function that I posted about here – this will search the local AD site and return a list of Exchange servers we can use. We'll choose a random Exchange server to connect to and import the EMS cmdlets into the local session:

#add all servers in the local site to an array
$servers = New-Object System.Collections.ArrayList
Get-ExchangeServerInSite | %{ [void]$servers.Add(($_.fqdn)) }

#select a random server from the current site
if($servers.count -gt 1) {
    $random = Get-Random -Minimum 0 -Maximum $servers.count
    $fqdn = $servers[$random]
}
else {
    $fqdn = $servers[0]
}

#create the session
$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange `
-ConnectionUri "http://$fqdn/PowerShell/" -Authentication Kerberos

#import the session
Import-PSSession $session

We'll save the Get-ExchangeServersInSite function and the above code to a script called Import-EMSCommands.ps1. When executed, the script will connect to a random Exchange server in the local Active Directory site and import the EMS cmdlets, as shown here:

You can download the entire script used in this example here.

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Tagged as: ActiveDirectory, EMS, Exchange, PowerShell, Remoting