Newbie question about how I can shorten the following...

PowerShell Help
1

Hello everyone,

I’m a PowerShell newbie with a question about shortening some cmdlets I ran recently in Office 365. I converted some mailboxes to Shared Mailboxes, 9 in total. I then had to add 5 users to each of the 9 mailboxes. Since at the moment I am only good at one liners, I ended up doing the following and running it in PowerShell ISE…

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User user1 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User user2 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User user3 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User user4 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User user5 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb2@email.com -User user1 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb2@email.com -User user2 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb2@email.com -User user3 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb2@email.com -User user4 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb2@email.com -User user5 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All

You get the idea. Did this for 7 other mailboxes. It ran fine of course but curious to know how I could shorten this since I know I’ll probably have to do this again in the future.

Thanks in advance for the help and advice.

Nelson

2

Here comes the basics, you have to use looping here.

  • Have usernames in an array or read it from a CSV of txt file.
  • Use Foreach-Object to iterate over.

Please read help documentation for ForEach-Object.

Get-Help ForEach-Object -Online
3

Looks like you could do a nested loop, too. Probably better to use the keyword foreach loop for nested loops.

Something along these lines:

$UserList = 'user1', 'user2' # etc
$EmailList = 'smb1@email.com', 'smb2@email.com' # etc

# Bonus: splatting!
$Params = @{
    AccessRights = "FullAccess"
    InheritanceType = "All"
}

foreach ($Email in $EmailList) {
    # Add/overwrite the email parameter
    $Params['Identity'] = $Email

    foreach ($User in $UserList) {
        # Add/overwrite in the user parameters
        $Params['User'] = $User

        Add-MailboxPermission @Params
    }
}

Now, in this instance it’s probably shorter without the splatting and just throwing all those parameters on the command call directly as you have it, but in my opinion it is a little tidier to do the splat.

4

Thanks so much for the replies. Definitely going to study these examples and practice practice practice.

Really appreciate the help! I’ll post how I end up doing it for feedback.

Nelson

5

This doesn’t work does it? I like commands that do that.

Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User user1,user2,user3,user4,user5 -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
6

Ha! No, I forgot to mention that was the first thing I tried. That’s why I resorted to the one liners in ISE.

Nelson

7

Always check Get-Help or Get-Command -Syntax and see what the parameter types are. If you see someType then it permits arrays of items, but if you see someType it does not. :slight_smile:

Both those displays have types in angle brackets, which apparently aren’t allowed even in safe forms on this forum. sigh

 

8 
echo user1 user2 user3 user4 user5 | 
foreach { 
Add-MailboxPermission -Identity smb1@email.com -User $_ -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All
} 
<p/re>
9

Thanks for the tip. Yeah Get-Help and Get-Member have helped me a lot in the learning process.

Nelson

10

Since the `-Identity` parameter accepts pipeline input. You can do this:

$UserList = 'user1','user2','user3','user4','user5'
$Email = 'smb1','smb2'
foreach ($User in $UserList) {
    $Email |Get-Mailbox |Add-MailboxPermission -User $user -AccessRights FullAccess -InheritanceType All -WhatIf
}

pwshliquori