| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

2011-05-26 Initial Post

Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise SP1 RU3

The other day we needed to give all users reviewer permission to our conference room mailboxes and allow the users to access the rooms’ calendars via a direct OWA URL on a SharePoint site. I used the example in the article “Using Outlook Web App Web Parts” at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232199.aspx. Under the Enter Outlook Web App Web Parts manually section of that article, the URL example it gives is https://email.fourthcoffee.com/owa/tsmith@fourthcoffee.com/?cmd=contents&f=calendar&view=weekly.

That URL didn’t work because I kept getting the error “You don't have permission to view this content. To get permission, contact the owner of the content.” And after a few hours of trying different things, I opened a MS support case. Guess what? The URL in that article is incorrect, per MS support. Apparently the author didn’t update the URL for Exchange 2010, even though the article is specifically for Exchange Server 2010 SP1 (as of 2011-05-26, the article still has the incorrect URL). Duh!

Below is the correct and incorrect format for the URL. Notice that the correct URL has “&module” instead of “&f.”

CORRECT URL:
https://email.fourthcoffee.com/owa/tsmith@fourthcoffee.com/?cmd=contents&module=calendar&view=weekly.
INCORRECT URL:
https://email.fourthcoffee.com/owa/tsmith@fourthcoffee.com/?cmd=contents&f=calendar&view=weekly.

I noticed one more issue, which had nothing to do with the incorrect URL. A user would get the page to change the OWA language settings for the mailbox and after clicking on OK to accept the default, the user would get the error "You don't have permission to open this mailbox.” After thinking about this, it made perfect sense. The user doesn’t have full access to the mailbox, only reviewer to the calendar folder, so the user wouldn’t be able to set the language on the mailbox itself. After logging onto the mailbox via OWA with an admin account and setting the language, the user was able to go directly to the mailbox’s calendar URL without any issues.

You can use PowerShell to set the language on all resource mailboxes, which saves time from having to set the language through OWA for each mailbox.

To set the language for one mailbox, use this code (note that the “languages” parameter is plural):

Set-Mailbox ConfRoomA1 -Languages en-US

To see the current language setting for a mailbox, use this code:

Get-Mailbox ConfRoomA1 | FL Languages

To set the language for multiple mailboxes, put all the mailbox aliases or e-mail addresses into a text file, one mailbox on each line, and then use the code below in a PS1 file to go through each mailbox and set its language.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010
$strInputFilePath = "\\FileServer01\Exchange\ListOfConfRooms.txt”
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "`a`a`a**** This script will set the language property for mailboxes listed in $strInputFilePath. Press any key to continue. ****"
$TempPause = $host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho,IncludeKeyDown")
#Change the language for your specific region.
Get-Content $strInputFilePath | ForEach {
Set-Mailbox $_ -Languages en-US
}

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2011 at 9:25 AM and is filed under Exchange Server, PowerShell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.