In Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft expanded the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) capabilities by supplying five new providers and 15 new WMI classes. In "Managing Exchange 2003 with WMI, Part 1," January 2004, http://www.winnetmag.com/microsoftexchangeoutlook, InstantDoc ID 40755, and "Managing Exchange 2003 with WMI, Part 2," February 2004, InstantDoc ID 41022, I showed you how to use these new providers and classes to manage Exchange servers, logons, mailboxes, and public folders. In this article, I finish the exploration of the new WMI features by showing you how to use the new providers and classes to manage Exchange queues and links.
Because all messages that users exchange go through the queues and links of an Exchange system, monitoring those queues and links and changing their states are crucial tasks. Exchange 2000 Server lets you perform some monitoring, but Microsoft made several important enhancements in this area in Exchange 2003.
Exchange 2003 provides a new WMI queue provider called ExchangeQueue2Provider in the Root\MicrosoftExchangeV2 namespace. This new provider doesn't replace but rather complements the Exchange 2000 queue provider called ExchangeQueueProvider in the Root\CIMV2\Applications\Exchange namespace. Both providers support a set of classes, which Web Table 1 (http://www.winnetmag.com/microsoftexchangeoutlook, InstantDoc ID 41342) describes. From this point on in the article, I concentrate on the new WMI queue classes in Exchange 2003. If you want additional information about the WMI queue classes in Exchange 2000, see the Microsoft article "Automating Exchange 2000 Management with Windows Script Host" (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/exchange2000/maintain/featusability/ex2kwsh.asp?frame=true. . . .
