If you have remotely anything to do with Microsoft Exchange, you probably know that Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) took place in Austin not too long ago. If you were an attendee, you were provided with access to recorded content within 24-48 hours after given session. However, if you were not an attendee, you didn’t have anyway to access recorded content. Until today!

Microsoft announced that all recorded MEC 2014 content was available publicly starting today on Channel 9. The content can be accessed on Channel 9 at this URL: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MEC/2014.

Paul Robichaux wrote a script to download MEC content (http://paulrobichaux.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/script-to-download-mec-2014-presentations/) which was before MEC content was made available publicly. Falak Mahmood wrote a script to download SharePoint Conference content from Channel 9 (http://falakmahmood.blogspot.se/).

Well, now that MEC 2014 content is publicly available I figured I would take inspiration from Paul and Falak to write a script that works with publicly available content. The script I ended up with is bit quick and while I have tried to make it easier to use, I haven’t put nearly as much time and effort as I have on some of my previous scripts. All it means is, the script will work fine in most cases, given the inputs are what script expects. If you are QA types who try to find how to break my script, you won’t need much effort.

Lastly, I assume you know how to set your script execution policy to “remotesigned”. Make sure you “unblock” the downloaded ps1 file and don’t trust my code blindly. I have no intention to break anything on purpose but unintentional errors are possible in my code.

And now the most important piece: The script. You can grab the script from here: Download-MEC2014Content.ps1.

While I have kept script simple as possible, I have provided 3 options. One is to download presentations which are powerpoint files, second is to download recordings of sessions which are high quality mp4 files and lastly, given the size of keynote, which is about 3GB, I have given that as an option you must explicitly select if you want to download keynote recording.

So go ahead and download the script, and feel free to make it your own. Here are some ideas to make it even better: Option to select session level (200/300/400), option to select MP4 quality or audio only download (MP3), better error handling and so on. Wish I had more time to dedicate to this than I would tackle each of these suggestion myself. But I’m just as happy to contribute little bit to community and hope that community will welcome it and make it even better.

Cheers!