At Microsoft Ignite 2019, we announced new Exchange Online management cmdlets and showed how they can be used to perform fast and highly reliable data retrieval operations. Today we’re delighted to be able to announce the general availability and full support of these cmdlets in all Exchange Online environments.
The V2 module is now available in the PowerShell Gallery and we recommend all Exchange Online customers start using these new cmdlets right away.
There are many good reasons to start using this module.
Firstly, it’s easy and non-disruptive to you, the admin – The new EXO V2 module contains all the existing Remote PowerShell cmdlets, as well as 9 new V2 cmdlets. So you can use the new module with no impact or change to your day to day tasks or scripts.
So if there’s no impact or change, why use it? There are in fact two great reasons.
Firstly, the new module is entirely Modern Authentication based. If you start using this, you are getting off Basic Authentication for your admin tasks, and as you know, that’s a good thing because Basic Auth is going away in Exchange Online. So just switching to this module means your connection is more secure and you have one less thing to worry about.
Secondly, and this is the real bonus – there are (currently) 9 new REST based cmdlets for the most commonly executed tasks and they are considerably faster and more reliable than their v1 counterparts.
How much faster and more reliable? Since we made the cmdlet module available in preview last year, we have seen millions of calls into Exchange Online using this module and these new cmdlets. In the month of May 2020 alone, we saw 150 million commands executed against Exchange Online using just the the 9 new cmdlets in the new module. That number is so big we’re going to say it again, and bold it. 150 million. And that’s in just one month.
Over that time, we’ve seen these cmdlets be 4-8x faster than their predecessors and seen them prove to be considerably more reliable (as confirmed by the feedback we’ve had). We are ready for prime time now, as 150 million executions in a month – was just us ‘testing’. (The numbers are quite something aren’t they)
We have plans to continue evolving and improving the module and we’re very open to feedback, either here on the blog or in the Office 365 Admin/Exchange Admin UserVoice forum here.
We can share that we’re considering adding more cmdlets, so we’d like to hear which cmdlets you think are most important. We’re currently working on support for PowerShell Core, and are hard at work on Service Principal and Certificate Based Auth support to provide a solution to those wanting non-interactive scenarios (we will blog about this separately).
We hope that you download and try out the new module today, we really think you’ll enjoy using it and the benefits you get from it. Please also see our previous blog post about this module as it contains some frequently asked questions about it.
The Exchange PowerShell Admin Team
