Configuring Public Folders in Exchange Server 2010

so to start with let's talk about the purpose of public folders it was first introduced as a many-to-many collaboration tool this provided a shared inbox so to speak what that means is those with permissions could view or view and contribute content to the folders and public folders can pretty much contain the same information that you have in your Inbox they can contain contact information calendars threaded discussions email message archives documents and much more but what happened as you can imagine is public folders became the dumping grounds for all sorts of information over time organizations allowed their public folder environments to just grow out of control and then as various versions of exchange were released instead of trying to adjust their public folder structure companies just migrated unneeded out-of-date information from one version of exchange to the next and the thinking was well disk space is getting cheaper so what's the difference if I have an unwieldy public folder structure who really cares disk space is cheap but there are actually two reasons why you as an exchange administrator should care about this first of all because if you're setting up a public folder structure from scratch then you can do it properly you can do it right you can do it in a way that it mitigates the growing out of control phenomenon that we've seen with the public folder structure in the past the second reason why it's important to do it right if you're going to use public folders and you're going to set this up relates to planning for the future of a move to perhaps another type of solution like SharePoint so we'll talk about that in a moment now as an administrator if you want to establish a public folder structure right from the beginning the first thing you need to do is create a public folder database so we're going to go through the process of creating that public folder database and you'll see that it's not really very difficult to no more complicated than creating a mailbox database but a public folder database is unique and separate from your mailbox database the next thing you'll need to do is establish the public folder structure now as an administrator you may be responsible for establishing the initial set up of folders so the top level hierarchy but from there others typically have permission to create additional folders within and that structure tends to grow it tends to grow right out of your control and that's a good thing on the one hand because it's something that you don't want to manage as an administrator you probably have a million other things to do so you want the public folder structure to take on a life of its own and grow but it's very important that those who have the responsibility and privilege to create additional folders to add content to the public folder structure well they need to have good guidelines in place so that it doesn't get out of control and make it more difficult for your organization in the future to move in another direction and last if you have additional mailbox servers then you can create replicas of your public folder structure you can create replicas of individual public folders and what's good about this is not only the redundancy of those folders but also the fact that you can put replicas where individuals can access that information a whole lot easier so you typically think about replicas when you consider long distances and putting that information closer to the people who are going to access it you don't necessarily have to replicate the entire public folder database to multiple locations but certain portions of it you may want to replicate to other servers that are perhaps geographically closer to the individuals that are going to be accessing those folders there's a lot of planning involved obviously in order to make all of this work smoothly now you might be wondering why does he keep talking about setting up a public folder structure but then he keeps mentioning moving in a different direction in the future well public folders have been de-emphasized within exchange with the release of exchange 2007 the Microsoft exchange team explained that public folders were being de-emphasized what the team said is Microsoft will continue to support public folders in the next major release of exchange server after exchange 2007 so that next major release well that's exchange 2010 so public folders are still supported in exchange 2010 then they said this means public folders will have full support for 10 years from release of the next major release of exchange server then they said Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in SharePoint which has focused platforms to support discussions team calendaring and collaboration in Windows SharePoint services and more mature enterprise content management with Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server so this gives us a heads up that we have a limited time to continue to work with public folders yes they're being supported they're supported in exchange 2010 they may not be supported in the next release of exchange so even though there may be 10 years of support for public folders with exchange 2010 going forward that doesn't necessarily mean that if you want to keep up with the technology that you'll be able to work with the next version of exchange and have public folders included so your mind may be racing and thinking ok so I have to get things prepared to move over to SharePoint and you may ask yourself the question so why learn about public folders at all well at this time it may be just what your company needs 10 years is a long way off and you may want to implement a public folder structure or you may have an existing structure that you need to continue to support and that's ok you don't have to stress too much about this just yet however the recommendation is if you are starting from scratch just go right to SharePoint it's a technology that Microsoft is heavily invested in and they've made tremendous strides if you look at SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 so you may have no desire to use SharePoint whatsoever and that's fine that's your decision but if you're looking at this and you're saying well I'm eventually going to need to move to SharePoint anyway I don't have a public folder structure to start with then Microsoft is trying to encourage you to move in that direction ahead of time however there are a few factors that may help you to make this move to SharePoint or to some other solution in the future so if you have an existing public folder structure you might want to make some changes to conform to the recommendations that we have listed here and if you're building a brand new public folder structure with that knowledge now that public folders are being de-emphasized well you can avoid frustration later by implementing good practices right here at the outset so some of the important factors to consider is the hierarchy do you want to start your hierarchy with let's say location so for example in the case of Globo man --tx there are three primary locations there's New York Chicago and Texas so you could have three top level folders that relate to locations you could also have top level folders that relate to high-end departments so how is your organization structured that's really the key you want to organize the public folders into business or project groups that will be relatively easy to work with going forward the next concern is content when considering a move to SharePoint you have to think about the volume and type of content in your public folders and that will impact how you approach the migration so you have to think about what's in your public folders what you're going to move over to SharePoint and how you're going to structure that content out the third thing is permissions with public folders individuals tend to own a public folder and they may want the permissions on that public folder to follow over to their SharePoint list so you have to consider what permissions exist now obviously again this is something that grows out of control in terms of who has permission to what so you're looking at leveraging third party tools to do this migration and to move over the permission structure so if you're setting up public folders now and it's a brand new structure keep in mind that the simpler your permission structure is the easier it's going to be to migrate and last but not least naming there are some SharePoint restrictions on file names length sizes character restrictions so those restrictions will affect public folders that are migrated over they may also affect documents within the public folders so that's something that you may not be able to control if you have an existing structure the naming structure may be all over the place already but when you're choosing a migration tool to move over to SharePoint you're going to want to consider a third party tool that takes naming into consideration so we are going to take a look now at public folders in exchange 2010 you're going to see that it's very simple to work with and it's easy to set up let's get started by going to our exchange server and creating a public folder database and then from there we'll use the public folder management tools to begin creating our hierarchy now in our case we're going to build it out based upon location and then within those locations we're going to include various departments the reason why we're doing that with global antics is because currently the structure is that each location has a different branch of the business so for example the legal department is located in New York the primary branch of the IT department is located in Chicago and there's a services department located in Texas so our structure will include all three of our locations at the top level and then one level deeper we're going to include those departments so that we can build a hierarchy that relates back to our organization itself ok so let's get started okay so here we are on our New York exchange server and under organization configuration here we've selected the mailbox node and you can see in the actions pane over here on the right that we can choose new public folder database so if we select that that'll kick off the wizard and we'll give it a very simple name pf1 the server name is easy enough seeing as how we only have one server our New York exchange server we say okay and click Next the database file path and log file path are automatically put in to start with logically you can change this if you want to put the database and log files in another location and typically that's what you want to do we're going to leave it here for now and leave this checkbox selected mount this database so that after the database is created it will also mount the database then we click Next we see a configuration summary and we click new so we see that the database has been created and now it's mounting the database okay and you can see here the powershell commandlets that's used in the background to create the public folder database and mount it as well we click finish and there's our new database now that we have this up and running the next step is to go to our toolbox and you'll notice here that we have the public folder management console let's open that up okay so here's the public folder management console it's pretty simple very easy to use and it's really a welcome tool that we didn't have with the RTM of exchange 2007 in fact when exchange 2007 was released without this public folder management console the only way to administer public folders was through the exchange management shell so this was frustrating to a lot of exchange administrators because Exchange Management shell was new PowerShell was new and now here you don't have a GUI console for public folders that had people pretty upset so with Service Pack one of exchange 2007 they gave us this public folder management console and it's nice to see that it carried over into exchange 2010 you can see here we have default public folders which currently there are none and then there are system public folders which include key forms registry offline address book schedule plus free/busy so we won't worry about these for now as far as explaining what those are all about if we look at the default public folders there's no items to show in this view so we're going to create the public folder hierarchy here let's take a moment and go back to the slides and let's look at the hierarchy that we're going to plan out because obviously after the serious conversation we had about establishing a hierarchy you don't want to rush through this process it's something you're going to have to sit down think about perhaps discuss with the team pull in others that you have to consult with and map this out properly okay so for demonstration purposes we're going to build out a public folder hierarchy for global antics there are a variety of different methodologies that you can use for accomplishing this for example you can go with a location Department team project type of methodology or you can mix this up you can have it structured by Department first and then locations you can have it structured by teams it's completely up to you and that's because each company needs to find its own methodology for creating a public folder hierarchy and permission structure now with Globo Mattox we did a little bit of research we looked into the various locations and how the departments are structured and it seemed easiest to structure this out by location so here our top level hierarchy is going to be New York Chicago and Texas and then beneath each of those public folder structures we're going to have legal IT and services okay so now let's go back to our exchange server and let's see how we would set up this structure here we are back on our New York exchange server and we're looking at the public folder management console and here we can see we have nothing set up so far there are no default public folders so if we look over here to the actions pane we can kick off the new public folder wizard and you can see it's pretty simple all we have to do is type in the name of the first folder in the hierarchy which in this case is just going to be New York and we'll say new ok now what's interesting about this is again it gives us the exchange management shell command and obviously if you're going to create a lot of these you may want to use the PowerShell command to script it in our case we're only creating a few so there we have New York will create Chicago and Texas so we'll leave the public folder structure as it is but if we wanted to create subfolders within these we would go to each one of these and put in our subfolder so for example New York Chicago has the IT department and Texas has services now one of the things you might notice over here on the actions pane is this option here to mail enable the public folder this is a personal choice depending on your organization if you want to enable some of these folders as mail enabled and what that will mean is you will then be able to not only post items to the public folder but you'll actually be able to email the public folder it will have its own email address now that may be something that you're interested in doing it may not depending on what your structure is so if you're interested in mail enabling a public folder you can click this link and follow the wizard there let's take a look at a user account through Outlook 2010 and let's see how the public folder structure works for the average user okay so here we are on a Windows 7 desktop and we're looking at Outlook 2010 you can see here we have James T Gray's mailbox and James is a member of globe oh man --tx if we click folder list here you can see public folders if we expand that out all public folders well there you go there are the public folders that we created on the exchange server as an administrator so now from this point James he can click into any one of these folders and he can read information or he can post information you see he can click new post or new items and put that right there in the public folder if he right clicks and attempts to delete the public folder you notice that he doesn't have that level of permission he has the ability to add a new folder into the mix and let's say he wants to add a folder in called sales you notice that he does not have the permission to create a subfolder under this folder so this is something that the administrator would have to give him if he wanted James as a user to have the ability to create subfolders he also doesn't have the ability to delete any folders or really make any changes so by default James has the ability to simply to read the public folder structure now we also have a session of Outlook Web App open here let's login as an administrator and you notice a little bit of a difference in the interface if we click public folders here we see all the different folders and if we want to we can create a new folder and because the administrator has the right to do that you can create folders and delete them it will you

Channel: Pluralsight IT - Training Archive

Views: 40,644

Keywords: Exchange Server 2010, public folders, configure public folders

Id: q403ybrwjN8

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 06 2013