Get to know the real Windows-geeks in your environment

I always like to check out who is using my environment, be it an on-prem Exchange setup or an Office 365 tenant.
One of the things I find interesting, is checking in on the devices being used to connect to Exchange. Mostly because it can warn me of issues that my occur; it wouldn’t be the first time some iOS update causes trouble. The second reason I like to do this, is because I like to know what user are the first to upgrade their device, be it Apple, Android or anything else. Those ‘early adopters’ might be the perfect users to help in testing out new features in Office 365. They’re usualy tech-savy and willing to cope with issues that come with working with bleading edge technology.

Find the users

When iOS7 was released, I used this simple Powershell one-liner to check on all devices running this operating sytem:

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Get-MobileDevice | where {$_.DeviceOS -like "ios 7*"} | ft UserDisplayName, FriendlyName, DeviceOS, DeviceModel

Block users

If you know what users are using a particular operating system on their mobile device, you can also use this information to block certain devices. For example if the latest iOS-relase breaks something in ActiveSync, like happened in the past.
With some Powershell, you can easily create an ActiveSync rule that blocks certain iOS-versions (or Android, or Windows Phone, or whatever).

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Get-Mailbox -ResultSize:Unlimited | ForEach {Get-ActiveSyncDeviceStatistics -Mailbox:$_.Identity} | where {$_.DeviceOS -like "ios 7*"} | Select-Object identity,devicemodel,DeviceFriendlyName,DeviceOS

Demonstration

Just to show my company actualy is full of nerds (well, I actualy prefer the term geek), I ran the following command against our Office 365 tenant:

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(Get-mobiledevice).count
65
(Get-mobiledevice | where {$_.DeviceOS -like "Windows Phone 10*" ).count
10

As you can see, more then one on every six mobile devices in our organisation is running a beta-preview of the new Windows Mobile operating system!