Public Folders in Exchange Server 2010: What You Should Know

Abstract

There will come a time when Exchange Server will be incompatible with Public Folders. For those of you who are using them a lot, there should be a plan in place to move away from them. For those who have never used them, now would not be the time to start. This white paper examines Exchange Public Folders and presents several scenarios where it may make sense to move away from them.

Sample

Introduction

In the early days of the beta version of what became known as Exchange 2007, the internet was littered with rumors and speculation about the demise of Exchange Public Folders. The implementation of Public Folders in the initial release to market instance of that product did little to convince us that Microsoft was going to support them for long. All administration of Public Folders had to be performed from the Exchange Management Shell, and that was a difficult pill for many Exchange admins to swallow. Furthermore, there was a lack of support for Public Folders in Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Things cleared up with Exchange 2007 SP1, when the Public Folder Management Console (PFMC) made its debut. While still lacking the ability to assign permissions, the PFMC allowed us to perform many tasks in a familiar-looking GUI environment, and the OWA issue was resolved. More importantly, Microsoft provided us with guidance about the future of Public Folders and the circumstances where we can and should use them. In this white paper we will examine Exchange Public Folders and consider where they fit in our plans for a messaging infrastructure. Our examination will take us through:

What Public Folders Are
Moving From Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010
Moving From Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010
Moving From Other Messaging Infrastructures to Exchange 2010
Leaving Public Folders Behind
What the Future May Hold

By the time you have finished reading this white paper, you may see some sunlight poking through the clouds of this issue.

What Are Public Folders?

With apologies to the seasoned Exchange admins out there, here is a thumbnail view of Exchange Public Folders. They are used bring together information that we wish to share with other members of our organization. Our Public Folders are often mail-enabled and are, therefore, the direct recipients of e-mail. They can also be used as a repository of information for collaborating users. As a result, in some Exchange organizations, the Public Folder infrastructure became quite extensive.

The replication of Public Folder content and structure can be performed extensively, but the toll on network and server resources has forced large organizations to scale back on their desire to make multiple replicas of the databases available, although without a highly accessible structure, the value of Public Folders diminishes greatly.

Historically, Public Folders were also used to disseminate free and busy information to aid in scheduling and to provide access to offline address books (OAB). The System Public Folders that performed the free/busy and OAB tasks were relegated to legacy status with the advent of Exchange 2007, Outlook 2007, and the Client Access Server role, which made them no longer necessary for those system tasks.

Moving from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010

For an enterprise moving from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server 2010, there are several questions that you must ask.

What version of Outlook is being used?
How much are Public Folders being used in the organization?
How are Public Folders being administered in the organization?
How much change can be tolerated in the migration?

What version of Outlook is being used?

Unless Outlook 2007 or later is deployed, the System Public Folders are still heavily used for the free/busy and OAB information. Those of you who have already installed Exchange 2010 (or 2007, for that matter) have noticed that during the wizard-based installation, a question about the Outlook version is raised. Unless the installing administrator answers that there are pre- 2007 Outlook clients in the environment, no Public Folder databases are created. While an error responding to that question can be corrected, it is best to make certain of your choice before the query is made.

How much are Public Folders being used in the organization?

There are some organizations that have Exchange structures that date back to the four or five versions of the product that have hardly used the collaborative features of the Public Folder. Sure, the system information was used, but that was under the covers. Of course, there are other organizations where Public Folders contain all files that are used in the enterprise. Most structures lie somewhere between the two extremes.

For those who are barely using Public Folders, the choice is easy - do nothing. As long as Outlook 2007 or 2010 will be used, do not even set up a Public Folder Database. Lest I forget to mention it, we can only have one Public Folder Database in our Exchange 2010 environment.