Exchange Server 2013 : Exploring useful EMS examples (part 2) - Creating a report in HTML

3. Creating a report in HTML

PowerShell is flexible in terms of processing output. Generated reports can show management and others the kind of work that servers do. The typical reports EMS generates are plaintext. You can also generate HTML reports by piping objects through the ConvertTo-HTML cmdlet. (The Out-HTML cmdlet at http://poshcode.org/1612 is also useful for generating HTML content.) This example explores how to generate a useful report that shows mailboxes that have exceeded their storage quota. You could use a report like this to check proactively for users who are experiencing problems with their quota and perhaps allocate them some additional quota to enable them to resume working. The output is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Viewing the HTML version of the mailbox report

Get-Mailbox –Database VIP | Get-MailboxStatistics | Sort TotalItemSize –Descending | ConvertTo-HTML DisplayName, Database, ItemCount, TotalItemSize > C:\Temp\Mbxs.html

You can enhance the output further by formatting the HTML with a style sheet or adding other information such as the date and time of the report. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

It’s worth noting that when you run the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet, you force EMS to make a remote procedure call (RPC) to the Information Store to retrieve the latest data for the mailboxes (individual, database, or server). The information is completely up to date and reflects the exact state of the mailbox rather than cached data that could be a couple of hours old. The Store caches information about mailbox quotas and updates the cache every two hours to avoid the overhead of the I/O that it would otherwise need to generate to check quotas every time a user attempts to send a message or to check that a mailbox can accept a new message.