Chapter 14: Public Folder Administration

Overview

For many companies, public folders are a major part of their Exchange Server deployments. Public folders are a powerful way to share knowledge and data throughout your organization, and they've been a staple of Exchange Server. They are a great way to share content and information with many users, and since they can be mail-enabled, they can also be an easy way for third-party application developers to hook into Exchange. Just use the MAPI libraries to connect to Exchange as a user with permissions to the specified public folder and you've got the ability to send and receive messages - and share them with multiple users - without having to do a lot of coding.

At the same time, public folder management has been a weakness in previous versions of Exchange Server:

• There is a distinct lack of freely available command-line tools for managing public folders and public folder stores. Some tools were available from PSS, but they weren't advertised and weren't generally supported for versions of Exchange past 5.5.

• The public folder support in the legacy Exchange System Manager lacked effective bulk operation support; you could not, for example, easily add a new public folder store to the replica list of a given folder and its subfolders without visiting each folder in turn or by overwriting the replica lists of the subfolders with copies of the initial folder's list.

• There was no easy way to export or import properties, permissions, or other settings from one public folder or server to another.

• The public folder replica and replication information displayed by the legacy System Manager was often incomplete, misleading, or just plain wrong.

• The Installable File System (IFS, or M: drive) introduced by Exchange 2000 allowed administrators to access Exchange store objects as if the store was a filesystem. Unfortunately, this allowed them to use inappropriate tools to make their management tasks "easier'' and introduced a whole new category of problems that could break public folders.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's announcement that it was deemphasizing support for public folders in Exchange 2007 has caused a lot of worry and confusion. When you combine this with the lack of any GUI public folder management tools in the initial release of Exchange 2007, a lot of people have come to the conclusion that you just can't do public folders anymore. If you've got a large public folder deployment in your organization, this is obviously an area of concern for you. Be assured that public folders are alive and well, and in some ways they're even better in Exchange 2007 than they ever have been. The new EMS cmdlets for handling public folders are definitely worth the price of admission, and even the lack of built-in GUI functions are offset by the wonderful tool known as PFDAVAdmin.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

• Understanding how public folders are supported in Exchange 2007

• Understanding the limits of public folder support in Exchange 2007

• Managing public folders

• Understanding and choosing which public folder management tools are available

• Working with the public folder hierarchy

• Managing replication.