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I assume you're doing user support with exchange and not administrating the server. I learned about powershell a lot from getting an exchange server with a DAG that broke constantly thrown my way. I use powershell just about everyday as a windows admin. I recommend checking out /r/powershell.

On a day to day, I'm running powershell to lookup user information even if it's just basic stuff I can do in cmdline such as "net user %username% /domain" to find some info on their account without having to go into ADUC. I'll use it to connect to Exchange Online and take a look at mailboxes and assign permissions or set out of office messages if I get a ticket like that. I create longer scripts and modules that I run to create new users, remove access to terminated employees, and to cleanup AD, O365, FileShares, etc. I've also written scripts to pull data from websites and put them in an excel spreadsheet and such.

Let's say I get a ticket in asking for employee A to have access to employee B's calendar. They could do this on their own, but why try to teach them when I can just quickly do this (of course I'd teach them if this was a constant thing). I'd open up my powershell console on my computer and connect to Exchange Online (My on-premise server if I was in my old environment) and I take a look at their current settings. So first I connect to Exchange Online. I have a profile setup to where I can run a cmdlet I have created that does the below by just typing "Connect-EXonline" into powershell.

$credentials = Get-Credential -Credential "$($env:USERNAME)@company.com"
Write-Output "Getting the Exchange Online cmdlets"

$Session = New-PSSession -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ <br /> -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -Credential $credentials
-Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session


From here I will be connected to my Exchange Online EAC. Now I'll want to grab their calendar permissions so I'll run a Get-MailboxFolderPermission on a mailbox to see what permissions they have and then if the request isn't already happening I'll run

Set-MailboxFolderPermissions -Identity [email protected]:\calendar -user [email protected] -AccessRights Editor

Or whatever I so please. There, I'm done. So I did that in 3 quick lines rather than clicking all through some clunky GUI.

Want to learn powershell? I recommend starting with "PowerShell in A Month of Lunches"
. This is how I started learning. Also go to /r/powershell and see the types of questions and answers people are asking/giving. If you want to learn python or bash, I don't have as much help for you other than to start with codeacademy.com if you don't know syntax already. Otherwise, find forums/subreddits for it.

Tl;DR: I recommend starting with "PowerShell in A Month of Lunches" if you are a windows admin and want to start learning PowerShell.

You can get a write blocker. It's normally used for forensics (to ensure the content of the USB device doesn't change when taking forensics images and such), but it would work for your purposes as well.

The advantage is obviously you could use this with anything you want to protect, instead of only a single USB key or hard drive with a built in write blocker.

http://www.amazon.com/CRU-Inc-31300-0192-0000-WiebeTech-WriteBlocker/dp/B002DH1P0W