Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Microsoft Exchange Conference Community Technical Airlift 2022. I talked about the challenges that organizations are facing that use Exchange scripts in their work processes or run them scheduled unattended.

Some of the challenges I mentioned, apart from the upcoming demise of Basic Authentication, and resources to methodically assess and make the necessary changes, are:

• Get your code more secure leveraging Certificate Based Authentication, especially for scheduled tasks.
• Get current with the most recent version of the Exchange Online Management Module for PowerShell.
• The same exercise with regards to AzureAD when using MSOnline or AzureAD modules, and the inevitable move to the PowerShell Graph SDK.

In the end I also quickly demonstrated how much easier and secure things can be when utilizing Azure Automation, which might especially appeal to organizations that want to totally get rid of any infrastructure for running jobs.

You can watch the presentation below. All sessions are you published on YouTube, and its playlist can be accessed at aka.ms/MEC2022.

The presentation as well as the deck and script used in the live demonstration can be retrieved from GitHub. The Analyse-ExoScript used in the demo can be found on GitHub as well, or look at the accompanying blog I wrote a while ago here.

Note that during MEC, it was announced that the next GA release of the Exchange Online Management module will be version 3. This jump is likely to prevent any confusion with earlier GA and preview releases. It was said the next GA release might be as early as next week, which should be good news for organizations who’s policy it is to not run Preview software in production environments.

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments or send me a message via the contact form.