Know Your Options

Because you don't have access to the options dialog box that you see when you access Directory Import or Directory Export through Microsoft Exchange Administrator's Tools menu, the only way to control the behavior of a command-line export or import is to use options files. (You can use any text editor to build an options file and save it as a .txt file.) First, look at this example export options file:

[export]directoryservice=sfo3exportobject=mailboxinformationlevel=none

The file's format resembles the familiar .ini file format. The file begins with the keyword export, which tells Exchange Administrator that the file is an export options file. (Import options files begin with the keyword import.) An easy way to ensure the consistency of your exported and imported data is to build one options file that contains both an export and an import section and use that file every time you do a command-line import or export. (You can place either section first in the file.)

Next, you need to specify one or more name-value assignment pairs. Each pair specifies the name of an Exchange Administrator setting and assigns a value to that setting. The example contains three settings. The setting directoryservice=sfo3 tells Exchange Administrator to export data from the server named sfo3. The setting exportobject=mailbox specifies that you want to include only mailboxes in the export file. The setting informationlevel=none tells Exchange Administrator not to log any information about the export.

The keywords that you can use in the name-value assignment pairs duplicate the buttons and switches in Exchange Administrator's Tools, Directory Export and Directory Import dialog boxes. (For more information about these dialog boxes, see "Super Export and Import Tools," August 2000.) Table A shows the most commonly used keywords, noting whether the keyword works for export options files, import options files, or both.