Need help converting your LDAP filters to OPATH?
Published Mar 12 2007 06:04 PM 159K Views

 

After installing Exchange 2007 into your existing Exchange organization, the address lists and recipient policies must have OPATH filters specified in order to administer them from the Exchange 2007 tools. As discussed in the earlier blog post, OPATH is the basis for the filtering syntax used by PowerShell, and is therefore the filtering syntax used by Exchange Server 2007.

Reading up on OPATH syntax can be a considerable time sink for an administrator who just wants to get his policies upgraded. I've written a PowerShell script that will perform these conversions for you, allowing you to save the OPATH documentation for the next time you're having trouble getting to sleep.

To use the script, just drop it somewhere on the Exchange 2007 server, change the extension to ps1, and change to that folder at the PowerShell prompt. The top of the script shows some various syntax examples, ranging from the simple conversion of a manually entered filter to the automatic upgrading of every existing legacy filter. Of course, before you just automatically upgrade every filter and call it a day, you should consider testing the script in your lab and saving your existing filters, just in case. One of the syntax examples shows how to write out the name, legacy LDAP filter, and suggested OPATH filter for each legacy object to a tab-delimited file, which you could then open in Excel for viewing. This is one of several ways you could save out your old filters before upgrading.

Some notes about the script:

  • All syntax examples assume you've changed into the folder where the script is, and that it's not in the path. If you drop the script in Exchange Server\bin you can eliminate the .\ that precedes the script name in the examples.
  • Some LDAP attributes are not available in OPATH. If the script encounters such an attribute in one of your filters it will report, "Could not convert LDAP attribute 'blah' to OPATH", and will fail out.
  • The script does very direct conversions from LDAP to OPATH. For instance, it typically will not use the 'RecipientType' property in OPATH since there is no LDAP equivalent. There is one exception where it looks for a specific string and produces 'RecipientType -eq UserMailbox' in response.
  • The script looks for filters matching the default address list filters and, if it finds one, it skips the normal conversion routine and produces the filter suggested in Evan's earlier post (http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/01/11/432158.aspx).

Hopefully this will save you some time during your Exchange 2007 upgrade!

The link to the script is below (ConvertFrom-LdapFilter.txt - download and rename to .ps1 to run):

LDAP to OPATH filter conversion script - attached to this blog post.

- Bill Long 

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