Chapter 18: CDO for Exchange Management and Windows Management Instrumentation

Overview

CDO for Exchange Management (CDOEXM), as its name implies, makes it easier for you to programmatically manage your Microsoft Exchange environment. The object model is straightforward and allows you to query and set administrative options on your Exchange server. With CDOEXM, you can create mailbox databases, mailboxes, storage groups, and public folder databases as well as new public folder top-level hierarchies (TLHs).

The Training application (introduced in Chapter 15) makes heavy use of CDOEXM in its setup program to figure out what sort of server you are running on and to allow you to create new storage groups, folder hierarchies, and folder databases. Figure 18-1 shows the interface in the Training application setup program that allows you to do this. You will notice that this interface also uses the Outlook Web Access (OWA) folder list control. You'll learn in Chapter 20 how to use that control as well as other controls included with OWA.

Figure 18-1: The Web page in the Training application setup program that allows you to create new locations to install the application

In addition to using CDOEXM to manage your Exchange infrastructure, you can also use the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) providers that ship with Exchange. WMI is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), which is an industry initiative to develop a standard technology for accessing management information in an enterprise environment. WMI uses the Common Information Model (CIM) industry standard to represent systems, applications, networks, devices, and other managed components .