Well it had to happen. Now that Exchange 2007 Beta has shipped, its time for some rest and relaxation... as a direct result of that, this blog won't get updated for at least a month. Yikes! Where will people get their insider tips from?!? No worries though, I've been updating http://exchangeninjas.com with all kinds of good stuff (specially the FAQs). I'm hoping the community really gets active--just recently there was a massive article posted on understanding one of the cooles features in E2007: Autodiscover (thanks Ashish!). Of course, I can't leave on vacation for that long without leaving some tidbits of info for folks to play with, so here goes:

• Flaphead was the first to write a one-liner hack to print all the tips that appear in the startup banner. Nice work!
• Speaking of get-tip, do you know that it is actually a script (or more accurately, a function defined inside Exchange.msh)? Check this out for the definition: dir function:\get-tip | fl
• Jane has a great post on some of the challenges in evangalizing PowerShell. Let me just say: 'I hear you loud and clear' and so does the PowerShell team. We're not here to replace GUI, we're here to complement it. If you're hearing anything other than that, its FUD, seriously. That being said, there will obviously be some rough customer conversations. In my experience, the best approach is to focus on reducing TCO through automation. The shell IS super cool, but the big win to companies small and large is the amount of time and money they will save by redcuing manual involvement in common tasks.
• Speaking of evangalism, if you haven't checked out Arlindo's blog yet, you should. He recently covered MOM 2007 and their usage of PowerShell. A few things of note: MOM 2007 employs the PowerShell concept of providers but have very few cmdlets---Exchange on the other hand is chock full of cmdlets but no providers. The main reason is that we (Exchange) wanted to abstract the user from the underlying stores---we pack in a LOT of intelligence in our cmdlets, plus many times we work against multiple data stores at once (AD, Store, Registry and so on), that its impossible to use the provider model in many cases.
• PhilosYphia has an insightful, though a little sarcastic/snippy article on administration on Windows. I picked it up because of the Exchange references in there (and I happen to know each person he mentions in there personally :).  IMHO, the article reads a little too much into the eWeek report on Exchange and how Admins on Windows don't get cmdline. Fun read.
• Clive covers Virtual Machine Manager and its integration with PowerShell. Again, another great example of how PowerShell is being used by various products across Microsoft. The one thing that confused me if that the product is based on PowerShell, why isn't the shell useable in beta 1? Another thing to note, the VMM team tends to have abbreviations where in Exchange we tend to be verbose. For example get-VM... I bet a lot of their cmdlets were designed before the Tab Completion feature in PowerShell was introduced. In Exchange we try to be as verbose as possible, as we know when in doubt, aim for the beginner or novice user. Of course, VM is such a common term, that its likely a concious decision on the VMM team's part.