Customers that I speak with in Education sometimes manage many tens of thousands of student accounts, and from time to time want to make programmatic changes to some of the mailbox attributes either individually or in bulk.  These changes can spring from a number of needs, for example assigning a bunch of students to a class as they make their module elections, changing classes during a year, name changes do to changes in life circumstance, and so on...  Thinking about how these changes are actually effected, again it can vary.  Administrative staff may wish to work directly against the Exchange Labs mailboxes with a script they kick off manually, or they may create a script that is driven by some automated processes they set up in support of identity synchronization between a student records system, or LMS, or Active Directory and other connected systems where a student identity is maintained.

In the demo associated with this blog entry, I have a look at how PowerShell can be employed to make changes against mailbox attributes in bulk...the scenario I use is modifying the class that a bunch of students have been assigned to.  I use the 'Department' attribute to store this information, you might choose to use some other attribute that is available for you to write into.  The demo is based on info you can find here.

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Jonny