Microsoft Updates Exchange Online Management PowerShell Module

Easy-to-Apply Upgrade for Nine-Cmdlet Module

Microsoft has updated the REST-based Exchange Online Management PowerShell module. This is an important release that you should upgrade to as soon as possible. To upgrade, run the following command from a PowerShell session with administrative permissions:

# Upgrade to the latest version of the Exchange Online Management module
Update-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement -RequiredVersion 0.3582.0

After the upgrade completes, check that you’re using the right module with:

Get-Module |?{$_.Name -eq "ExchangeOnlineManagement"}| Select Name, Version

Name                     Version
----                     -------
ExchangeOnlineManagement 0.3582.0

Version 0.3582.0 is the latest release of the Exchange Online Management module available at the time of writing. It might be newer when you upgrade. As you can see by the zero used for the major version number, this module is still a preview release.

The developers have included some release notes with the module:

(Find-Module 
# Access release notes for the Exchange Online Management module
(Get-Module ExchangeOnlineManagement).ReleaseNotes

Bug Fixes and Upgrades

Apart from several security and other bug fixes in the new module, the new module contains four important updates:

• The date field returned by the REST cmdlets should now be formatted in the locale of the workstation (I complained about the problem in this article). I see some instances of invalid date formats being reported by the cmdlets, so the developers have some more work to do here.
• Support added for using the cmdlets to manage Exchange in a different tenant via the AzureADAuthorizationEndpointUri parameter for the Connect-ExchangeOnline cmdlet.
• Previously, if you ran Connect-ExchangeOnline and passed it a PSCredential object in the Credentials parameter, the credentials object and any access tokens would be emptied. You’d connect to Exchange Online but would need to re-enter credentials to connect to any other PowerShell endpoint (like Azure Active Directory or Teams).
• The Alias and DisplayName properties of mailboxes can be used as input identities for the REST cmdlets. Previously, the cmdlets limited identities to the object identifier and user principal name of accounts.

Frequent Updates

As always, it’s a good idea to check for module updates periodically to ensure that you don’t miss out on bug fixes. The Exchange Online Management is still in preview, so more bugs are expected, and change will be faster.

Because these cmdlets deliver great performance and reliability benefits when dealing with very large sets of Exchange objects, some are looking for a way to run them in a secure manner in background processes. I know that this is high on the list of what the engineers want to do in the near future, so that’s another good reason to keep checking for updates.

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