The problem with this is when an email is sent to a mail enabled group, all the member groups of that group must be mail enabled for their members to receive the email. So I needed to bulk mail enable a container of groups, and also hide these new groups from the Address Book as they don’t need to be visible to staff.

Exchange 2010 only allows you to mail enable a group if it is a Universal group, and then only one at a time from the EMC. To convert all the Global groups in a particular container to universal groups, I used the following Power Shell command.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory
# List Tables
Get-ADGroup -SearchScope Subtree -SearchBase "OU=StaffGroups,OU=Staff,DC=win" -Filter {GroupCategory -eq "Security" -and GroupScope -eq "Global"}  | Format-Table

# Convert Global groups to Universal
Get-ADGroup -SearchScope Subtree -SearchBase "<code>OU=StaffGroups,OU=Staff,DC=win</code>" -Filter {GroupCategory -eq "Security" -and GroupScope -eq "Global"}  | Set-ADGroup -GroupScope Universal

Once converted to Universal groups I wanted to Enable the Groups as Distribution groups in Exchange and hide them from the global Address Book. These groups are role based and need to exist for group expansion in Exchange, but I don’t want them visible to everyone.

# Load AD Modules
Import-Module ActiveDirectory

# Load Exchange Snapins
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.E2010
. $env:ExchangeInstallPath\bin\RemoteExchange.ps1
Connect-ExchangeServer -auto

# Get list of Groups not Mail Enabled
$b = Get-ADGroup -SearchScope Subtree -SearchBase "OU=StaffGroups,OU=Staff,DC=win" -Filter {GroupCategory -eq "Security" -and GroupScope -eq "Universal" -and mail -notlike "*"}

# Enable email for each group, use the Group name without spaces as Alias
$b | ForEach-Object { Enable-DistributionGroup -Identity $_.DistinguishedName -Alias ($_.Name -replace '\s|,|\.') }

# Hide the newly created groups from Global Address book
$b | ForEach-Object { Set-DistributionGroup -Identity $_.DistinguishedName -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true}
 

Notes:

• Details on replacing letters for alias is from here.
• Mike Pfeiffer’s blog had great instructions on how to load Exchange snap-ins into a normal PowerShell session, such as in ISE.
• I found a few sites that mentioned using get-group instead of get-adgroup. Not sure why the wrong command is given. Petri

Comments or questions are welcome.

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Some additional notes:

To use the DET mail server you can either add mail.det.nsw.edu.au to the mail section of your php.ini file or add it to the
Admin -> Server -> Email: SMTP Hosts section.
If you wish to restrict to sending to DET emails you can add following to the Allowed email domains : “education.nsw.gov.au det.nsw.edu.au“.
Make sure to test the mail server settings before adding any restrictions to domains.

If using Novell or Mac OS you will need to use a different LDAP browser as AD Explorer only works with Active Directory.
For Novell I usually use the free Windows program Softerra LDAP Browser (MSI).
There are a few Java based LDAP browsers that should work with Mac. A good Java based LDAP browser is JXplorer this should work on Mac, Windows and Linux. For some more info on Mac and LDAP look at this article on LDAP in Mac OS X Server from the Mac Dev Center, it is not fully applicable as it also has home drive mapping but it does contain some useful info.

Paul Ganderton has made his Geography HSC site avaliable for guests. You can also view some of the other course on our Moodle site. Look for this logo which means guest access is allowed.

Bulk Operations: Some people asked about bulk deletion of users and courses.
This section has been moved to Moodle: Bulk Deletion Operations.

Presentations:

• Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.
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• Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

Plugins used by Moodle

Some of the items shown during talk are produced by plugins to Moodle. Below is a list of some of our favourites:

• Book: Allows structuring resource pages with chapters and pages.
• Gallery: Shows slide shows and generates thumbnails of images. You can upload a zip file containing an entire folder structure of pictures, and auto-generate albums and sub-albums from it.
• Course Menu: Creates a Tree Structure as a block on side of page to assist navigation.
• Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file. On the main SBHS Moodle page there is also a Library block that sends search queries to our Sentral library page. This will need to be customised by schools to point to their Sentral system or the new DET My Library system (only accessible inside DET WAN). Just modify the block_library.php file to point to your Library search page. To install place the library directory in your Moodle blocks folder.