XADM: Tips for Managing Public Folders

MORE INFORMATION

1. Design a public folder scheme for your organization. Decide how public folders will be used in your organization to organize data and how to facilitate easy access to the data in the public folders. For example, you may have public folders organized by geographical locations (North America, Europe, and so on), or by business units (Finance, Marketing, Development), or any other manner that works in your organization.
2. Once the fundamental public folder design is in place, create the top level public folders.
3. Control which users can create top level public folders. This allows the Microsoft Exchange administrator to control the basic structure of how information in the public folders is organized. The administrator can control which users can create top level public folders by using the Exchange Administrator program.
   
   Under the Site object, select Configuration and then get properties of the Information Store Site Configuration object. Go to the Top Level Folder Creation page.
4. The Exchange administrator can also control how the public folder hierarchy is displayed to individual users by setting the Client Permissions on the individual folders. Each public folder has a property called Folder Visible. If this permission is not granted to a user, then that user cannot view that public folder in the public folder hierarchy. For example, if all public folders under a folder called Finance should not be accessible to any users other than upper level managers, the default permissions on that public folder can be set with the Folder Visible permission revoked. The individual users or Distribution Lists of users who need access to the folders can then be granted rights to be able to view the Finance folder.
5. Create replicas of public folders on different servers depending on how many users will need to access the public folders and the types of network links. For example, if a public folder is accessed by all users in your organization, it may be useful to add replicas of this folder to other servers and other sites. If the network links are sufficient, adding public folder affinity may also be an alternative to replicating folders.