How to delete partnerships that don’t show up in OWA
Recently I moved my mailbox from Office 365 back to our on-premise Exchange server (hybrid config). After the change, I started receiving email messages that I had met my 10 mobile device partnerships limit in Exchange. When looking in OWA, I only showed my one mobile phone partnership.
I started my troubleshooting steps in Active Directory. I changed my view settings to show Users, Contacts, Groups, and Computers as containers. Navigating to my user account and expanding it showed 10 devices, yet I couldn’t delete them because they were owned by Exchange.
Connecting to Exchange Management Shell, I ran the following:
Get-ActiveSyncDevice | fl name,identity
This produced a list of devices for everyone in our Exchange environment but only displayed the device names and their identities. This list was quite long, some of the devices did not display a name, and there was no easy way to filter it by user. The command to run that narrows this search down to the individual user is:
Get-ActiveSyncDevice –Mailbox “domain\useraccount” | fl name,identity
Unfortunately, the remove-activesyncdevice command does not allow you to use the name of the device to remove it from Exchange. You will need to type the entire Identity string into the command. In our environment, the identity path for each device is quite long, so the command we used to run to remove the partnership was:
Remove-ActiveSyncDevice –Identity “corp.contoso.com/Users - Staff/Cincinnati Staff/Intrust Man/ExchangeActiveSyncDevices/WindowsMail§F7EBD77EC245FCDCC318B065C2FB4A48”
I ran this command for each of my devices that I knew were not being used any longer. From the first command output above, I also ran it for each of our users to clean up stale records from their accounts.
Another way to do this is via a script that was created by Microsoft. It does require a bit of setup, but for large organizations, it provides more options for user filtration and deletion. That site link is:
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/office/Remove-old-Active-sync-447a0687
