This one is a really quick note. Yet another example to show off the power of the PowerShell pipeline and its interoperability with the COM world.

Recently I had to add 30+ existing PST files to an instance of Outlook. I hate using the mouse and keyboard for repetitive tasks (File –> Open Outlook Data File –> browse to the path –> click OK), so I set out to do the same through some form of scripting.

Luckily, PowerShell can create instances of COM objects, and Outlook provides a COM library to automate Outlook. It was a matter of a few minutes then to look around on Bing and compose the script:

Add-type -assembly "Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook" | out-null
$outlook = new-object -comobject outlook.application
$namespace = $outlook.GetNameSpace("MAPI")
dir “c:mypath*.pst” | % { $namespace.AddStore($_.FullName) }

One interesting thing with this is that you may need to run this with the correct version of PowerShell (32-bit is at c:windowssyswow64windowspowershellv1.0powershell.exe) to match the bitness of Outlook installed on your machine.

Also, if you do plan to use the above script, make sure you replace the path with the correct ones. Also do note that if the PST file path is incorrectly specified, Outlook will create a PST at that location, so be careful!

The AddStore method is documented here. Do note though this COM interface does not permit the addition of password protected PST files. In that case you may want to explore the third-party Redemption library.

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