Next meeting of the Colorado Unified Communications User Group is all about bringing back some goodness from the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC)!

We are excited to have Jason Sherry (Exchange MVP) come talk to us about Exchange migrations!

"Exchange cross forest migrations: Free or 3rd party tools?" is the title and this session will cover the steps required to migrate from one Exchange 2000 or higher forest to Exchange 2010/2013 in another forest. A high-level outline of the steps, scripts, Microsoft tools, and notes from the fields will be discussed.  Discussion will cover the scripts included with Exchange 2010 and 2013 to migrate mailboxes across forest and how to migrate contacts, groups, policies, and many other settings that aren’t migrated by those scripts. The main focus will be the many additional steps, solutions, and scripts required to do a full fidelity migration. This session will not go into detail on Forefront Identity Manager and 3rd party solutions; however the use of them will be discussed.  This session will mainly focus on the needs of small to medium companies (< 3,000s of mailboxes). Information discussed will be helpful to any size organization that needs to do a cross forest migration.

We are also super excited to announce that ENow will be sponsoring this months meeting and we will get to hear from them about their tools inconjuction with Exchange and Hybrid solutions. If you haven't seen their products, check them out or follow them on Twitter: @ENowConsulting.

We hope that you will join us on May 29th from 4-6pm for this great session.

Also... I have another great #ucoms Update deck... you won't want to miss this one!

The meeting will be held at the Microsoft office in the Denver Tech Center.

Microsoft Offices
7595 Technology Way
Suite 400
Denver, CO 80237

Please RSVP so we can make sure there is enough food and drink

Chocolatey - RPM style package management for Windows

While I was researching how to deal with Forms Based Authentication from a script perspective, for my Audiocodes backup script(s), I stumbled upon Chocolatey. Chocolatey NuGet (love the name) is a Machine Package Manager similar to what RPMs are for Linux. This allows crazy simple install and uninstall of software from PowerShell... silently.

There are currently 1872 unique packages available and they install with a simple command like:

     cinst sysinternals

Simple, eh?

If you want to install Chocolatey just go to their home page and run the install command from within a cmd window. Then search for packages that are interesting to you...

Here are some that are my favorites so far:

Sysinternals
http://chocolatey.org/packages/sysinternals

PuTTY
http://chocolatey.org/packages/putty

Fiddler
http://chocolatey.org/packages/fiddler

cURL
http://chocolatey.org/packages/curl

Wireshark
http://chocolatey.org/packages/wireshark

Anyway... you get the idea... now go have some fun!