How to record everything you do inside Exchange Management Shell

Let's presume you are working for the company that offers IT services to other companies. One of the things you can do with Exchange 2007 is you can record everything you do in Exchange Management Shell not just for your own records but also in case you need to prove what you did on Exchange server if there is a need for that. We all know how hard sometimes cutomers can be ;)

So, to start recording everything you do in Exchange Management Shell you use following command:

Start-Transcript C:\SOMEFOLDER\WhatYouDid.txt -Append

As you can see, we start the transaction recording by creating WhatYouDid.txt file in one of the folders on C: drive. After that we can start executing commands inside Exchange Management Shell. To finnish recording we just simply execute

Stop-Transcript

You can than browse to and open WhatYouDid.txt file. Sample output of the file:

**********************
Windows PowerShell Transcript Start
Start time: 20070722225904
Username  : DOMENA\Administrator
Machine      : HUB1 (Microsoft Windows NT 5.2.3790 Service Pack 2)
**********************
Transcript started, output file is c:\transcript\WhatYouDid.txt
[PS] C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>get-transportconfig

ClearCategories                : True
GenerateCopyOfDSNFor           : {5.4.8, 5.4.6, 5.4.4, 5.2.4, 5.2.0, 5.1.4}
InternalSMTPServers            : {0.0.0.0}
JournalingReportNdrTo          : <>
MaxDumpsterSizePerStorageGroup : 18MB
MaxDumpsterTime                : 7.00:00:00
MaxReceiveSize                 : unlimited
MaxRecipientEnvelopeLimit      : unlimited
MaxSendSize                    : unlimited
TLSReceiveDomainSecureList     : {}
TLSSendDomainSecureList        : {}
VerifySecureSubmitEnabled      : False
VoicemailJournalingEnabled     : True
Xexch50Enabled                 : True

[PS] C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>Set-TransportConfig -InternalSMTPServers 10.10.0.4
[PS] C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>Stop-Transcript
**********************
Windows PowerShell Transcript End
End time: 20070722225950
**********************

From the file you can see that I executed Get-TransportConfig and Set-TransportConfig -InternalSMTPServers commands.

Recording works for current (the window you start transaction in) Exchange Management Shell window only.