1. Understanding Public Folders
So what are public folders? All right, so public folders allow our users to easily share and organise information into a folder that can be accessed by the different users in Microsoft Exchange. You can also control the permissions on it as well. So in Access Control, I can have a public folder made available to my users and give permissions to the public folder, and those users can share that information with other users if they want. This was one of the primary methods years ago, particularly when users could easily organise and share data with other users. This information is all available through Microsoft Outlook, and you can even mail enable a public folder, which basically means that the public folder gets an email address, and when you email it, the information goes into the folder. So attachments, messages, and things like that can all be organised into the public folder. I will also say that Microsoft is kind of frowning upon this now. They don’t really want you using this feature anymore as your main way of sharing information in your enterprise, though it used to be one of the preferred ways. Now we have SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, which kind of works with SharePoint as well, and even Teams for team collaboration. I’ll go over some of the applications of it here in a moment, but I wanted to point out right away that Microsoft is attempting to steer everyone in a different direction. Now. Public folders are generally accessed through your Outlook clients. So you have Outlook on the web. Formally known as Outlook Web App (OWA), Formally known as Outlook Web Access They’ve changed the name a few times here. And then we have to start with normal versions of Outlook, and then even Outlook for the Macintosh. All right, Outlook for the Mac and Office 365 are all going to support public folders as well. Some of our uses for public folders So one of the main things that public folders are still kind of recommended for is distribution groups. So, like if I had a distribution group called [email protected], this creates a place for that distribution group to share files. So that distribution group can essentially have a public folder tied to it, and people can collaborate and use that as a place to store files, messages, and all of that for that group. Now, what is it not used for? They really don’t want you using it for data archiving. In other words, as a mailbox backup solution. Actually, we have archived mailboxes for that for our users, and that’s recommended. Another thing they don’t recommend is making document sharing and collaboration the primary method of collaboration. Again, they’re attempting to persuade people to use SharePoint One, Drive for Business Teams, and other similar tools as our primary means of collaborating and document sharing with one another. The big problem with trying to use it for document sharing and collaboration is that it doesn’t support versioning, whereas things like OneDrive for Business and all that do. So you have data that’s like a file or something that’s created on a Monday, and then it gets overwritten on a Tuesday, then a Wednesday, and then a Thursday, and then maybe Friday rolls around and somebody’s like, “Oh no, we got to see our data the way it was back on Monday.” Well, you can’t really do that, not unless you want to have your databases backed up and then restore them from a backup. That’s a lot of work. Whereas with something like OneDrive for business, in, no joke, just a few seconds, you can go back in time on a file and see what that file used to look like. So those are some of the uses of your public folders, and then some of the things you shouldn’t use public folders for, which is hard for people to wrap their brains around sometimes. Just because they’ve had public folders in place for a very long time—for lots of companies, 20 years—they tend to keep doing the same thing over and over. Microsoft is really trying to say, “Look, you can still use it for these things, but we’ve got better solutions available for you.” Okay? So with public folders, you no longer have what was called a “public folder database” like we did years ago. Now everything is done through mailbox databases. But in order to create public folders, you do have to have what’s called a “public folder mailbox.” The public folder mailbox When you create a public folder mailbox, it becomes what’s called the primary hierarchy mailbox. And then you can have multiples of those. The primary hierarchy mailbox is where your writable copy of all of your data goes. All other mailboxes, including public folder mailboxes, have read-only copies. So you can have a secondary copy of all your data, and all that stuff gets backed up when you back up your mailbox database. As a result, you can easily backup your data. But ultimately, yes, you’ve got to have a primary mailbox for this, and then all other copies are secondary. The primary is the writable copy, and the secondaries are just all read-only copies. Okay? And, in terms of managing public folders, it’s the same two ways of doing most things in exchange. You can use the exchange administrative centre, the graphical tool, or EMS, the exchange management shell. So, in other words, PowerShell And I’ve got some of the main public folder commands listed there for you. For those disables, you have your standard verbs: get, get new, remove, set, and then your nouns. You have different nouns that you’ll utilise to manage the functions of public folders. These are some of the common commands that you’ll use: mail, public folder noun, this public folder, sync, mail, public folder. So you can enable mail, public folders, get information about public folders, perform syncing, and delete stuff if you want. And of course, as always, the set verb is always going to be used to modify something. Overall, I’d say this public folders feature is still fairly simple to maintain, manage, and exchange, despite Microsoft’s efforts to steer everyone in a different direction. A lot of people like to use it just because they’re used to it and it’s pretty easy to set up. All right, but public folders are still available in Exchange. They haven’t deprecated it, or there were a lot of people talking about the fact that Microsoft is probably just going to remove it altogether. Who knows, they might someday, but there hasn’t been much talk about them completely exiting the exchange organization. So as of right now, you can still manage public folders using the EAC as well as the EMS.
2. Creating Public Folders in On-Premise Exchange
if you want to create a public folder as child I can say “new public folder,” then specify the name, which will be “Reports.” Okay. And then I can specify the path, and the path is going to be, “Finance,” hit enter, and that’s going to create a folder called Reports inside Finance. So, if I recourse on that get Public folder, you can see that everything has been created. Just as a side note, another thing you could do if you wanted to is specify which mailbox. So if you created multiple mailboxes and you wanted to tie it to a specific mailbox, all you would have to do is use the dash mailbox parameter and specify the name of the mailbox you wanted it to go to. Everything’s going in my primary mailbox, which, of course, if you remember, is what we had created right here.
So we go to public mailboxes. In the EAC, you can see the primary mailbox created. I don’t have any others by default. The other, if I create another public mailbox, is going to be where you have read-only copies at. Okay, so I’m just refreshing my screen here, and my public folders are taking a few moments to appear. But all your public folders that you’ve created will officially show up here. And as you can see, there’s the finance folder. I’ll just click on that, and then there’s the Reports folder. Okay. And of course, using PowerShell, changing the noun, and all that, you could set permissions on it if you wanted them. You could mail-enable it if you want. If I want to mail enable a public folder, all I have to do is select it and then click the mail enable button.
Okay? So if I wanted to mail enable finance, I could, and if I wanted to mail enable all three marketing channels, let’s go ahead and just mail enable them all three marketing mail enable sales. So now, if anyone emails [email protected] or [email protected] finance, a copy will be saved there. The other thing is that if you attach it to an existing distribution group, it essentially becomes a part of that distribution group as well.
Okay? All right. As a result, this is also how you enable the public folder in your email. Okay. So going through it, you can work with it graphically very easily using the graphical tool. You can easily create the things using PowerShell and see it all, and then mail enable it, as you can see, which is also very simple. Of course, you can also manage the permissions. You can alter permissions with PowerShell as well through EMS if you want also. So all in all, you’ll see that it’s not too difficult to go in and work with your public folders through the EAC and through PowerShell. And one more thing I want to show you: I just want to open up the OWA for the user Adam West, who, if you remember, we associated with this sales container here and set some permissions. We gave Adam West owner permission if we manage permissions.
So what I want to do is just quickly open up the web browser here, and we’re going to go to https: Ex. Owa So we’ll connect to our OWA here and log in as Adam West enters his password. Of course, you can do this through Outlook as well. This is just kind of a quick way to pull this up while we’re here on Exchange. When you first come in here, you’ll see Adam West’s email. What you’ve got to do is just right-click Favorites, and then you can click Add public folders to Favorites. So I’ll just click that, and as you can see, there are the public folders that I’ve got available, all right, for Adam West. and he can essentially add these folders. And you can just add these to your favorites if you want.
Of course, the one he owns is the sales one. So he can go in and actually alter the sales folder. He can actually put things in it—store files in it, store emails in it—because he does have those ownership rights. Of course, because we did enable mail, you could also email Sales at ExamLabPractice.com and have a copy of that appear right here. Okay? All right. So I’m just throwing a test in here. This is an example, all right? And we’ll just click to post that, and it’ll be added to sales. So there you go. very easy and very straightforward. One more thing I’d like to show you First off, you’ll notice that the little test message is now in the Sales folder. What I want to do, though, is jump over to a different email account. We’re going to look at the administrator’s email account. So here we are, at the administrator of examlabpractice.com.
We’re going to click to create a new email. We’re going to email the mail-enabled folder. So we’re going to go to [email protected], okay? And I’m just going to call this a test of a public folder, all right? And then I’m just going to say, “Blah, blah, message blah.” All right? And then we’ll hit send and see if the message gets through. Now, depending upon how much memory your Exchange server has, this can take a moment. But if we pop back up here, I’m going to go ahead and refresh my browser rough. NoSo revitalising for my browser. And then we’re going to jump back into the public folder and see if it’s there for us. All right, so taking a moment and waiting on the public folders There it is, right there. And we should see that that email is located in the Sales public folder as soon as it gets refreshed here. All right. And there it is, right there. So, administrator, this is a test folder, blah, blah, message block. So, as you can see, it did work. And that gives you an idea—a good idea—of how the mail-enabled side of things works as well.
3. Working with Public Folders in Exchange Online
I’d now like to open up Exchange Online and take a look at public folder creation with the Exchange Online services. So we’re right here in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. You can get here by going to portal Microsoft.com.
We’re going to click the “Show all” symbol and then click “Exchange,” which is going to bring us into Exchange Online. Now, just like you would do with the Exchange on Prem Server, you’re going to click on the public folder blade here. And this is where you can create public folders. You’ve got to have a public mailbox, which I actually already have. I have a public mailbox here called Test. If you wanted to create another one, you just hit the plus sign, and you can name it whatever you want. It’s going to call it secondary. And then we’ll save it, and it’ll be in our secondary public folder mailbox for us.
And then at that point, if it was the first one we created, it would be the primary. I’ve already got a primary, but I’m going to jump over here to public folders and create a public folder. So, how about marketing for the first public folder I’m going to make? So we’ll just do marketing, hit save, and click okay. We can mail enable that if we want, just like we can with Exchange on Prem. And we can manage the permissions if we want. It’s the same thing; specify which users have access to it. So I’ll press the plus sign and give myself the email address [email protected].
Okay, we’ll give myself owner ability here, which is everything. Hit Save. And we’ve got the permissions added there for the marketing folder. Okay, I’m going to close now, and I want to create another folder. I’m just going to call this one “Test Save.” If you want, you can enable it by clicking OK mail. I’m not going to mail-enable this one. I’m going to click Manage, and I can set the permissions on it. So I’ll just kind of do the same thing. And here we go. give ownership, right? Protect yourself from that. As a result, I have a couple of public folders here. and this time I’ll pull up Outlook. So we’ll pull up Outlook and take a look. Okay, so Outlook is up here. This is the outlook: 365.
And if you look down here, you’ll see it says “Public folders.” I can expand that to all public folders. And there we go. We had marketing and testing. Okay, so that’s how you can see that in Outlook. So all in all, you can probably tell that working with public folders cloud-wise really isn’t much different from working with public folders on premise. It’s really the same beast. You, of course, can also use PowerShell to work with all that as well. You can connect in through PowerShell, add all that if you’d like, and work through it there as well. You’ve got to connect to the Exchange online, which we’ve seen how to do before. Okay, but all in all, it’s the same thing. You’re going to work with it exactly the same way. And the usage for it is the same as with Exchange on Prem as well.
4. Planning a Public Folder Migration to Microsoft 365
That involves taking your on-premises public folders and synchronising those out to the cloud. So if we’re trying to start migrating things into our Exchange Online environment and pulling those from the on-premises world to Exchange Online, there are a few things to understand about public folders. First off, your on-premises Exchange server must be at least Exchange Server 1013 with Cumulative Update 15 or later. If you’re running Exchange 2016, then it’s got to be Cumulative Update 4 or later. If you have Exchange 2019, you’re set. All versions of Exchange 2019 can pretty easily migrate public folders from on-premises to the cloud.
Okay, there are a couple of other things worth mentioning here. You must be a member of the organizational management role on both the on-premises side as well as the Exchange. So, in order to perform the migration, you must be a member of the organizational management role group on both ends. Okay? The other thing is, there’s no graphical way to do this public folder migration. It’s all going to be done through the Exchange Management Shell.
You can’t use the Exchange Administrative Center in order to do it. Another thing to note is that your public folders being moved should be less than 25 gigabytes. So that could be a problem. Basically, you need to offload some stuff out of a public folder if it’s more than 25 gigs. Okay? The other thing is that even though Exchange Online can support up to 1000 public folders, you’re only allowed to migrate 100. When it comes to migrating, Microsoft has set a hard limit. You’re going to use some migration scripts that are going to take care of this. And you can do a single public folder at a time, or you can actually do a batch operation. So you can create a bunch of folders all at one time.
The PowerShell scripts that are needed to do this can be downloaded right from Microsoft’s website. Here’s a look at these different scripts. Now I’ll tell you too: Microsoft has a nice knowledge-based article that shows you step by step how to use each one of these scripts.
Okay? So the first script you’ll see there is the source-side validation. So, as you can probably imagine, this is based on its name. This is going to be used to do some validation for you. This is going to go through and generate a source report of the stuff that you have on your premise. It’s going to also try to help you fix any issues you might have with any of your on-premises public folders before they get moved to the cloud. Okay? You’ve also got the Sync Modern Mail public folders. Psion script. This is going to synchronise your mail-enabled public folder objects between your Exchange on premise and Office 365 Exchange Online. They have a support file. Any of these PSD one files, such as syncmodernmail public folders String PSD 1, these are known as support files, and they work in tandem with the previous.
So the sync Modern Mail public folder uses that file, and it is a support file for that. Then you’ve got the export and modern public folder statistics. This is going to bring all of the statistical information that’s going to go with the things that have been liked, the size information, and all of that. You also have a support file for that, the Export Modern Public Folder Statistics string PSD, as well as the Modern Public Folder to Mailbox Map Generator. Okay, so this particular file command is a script that also does exporting. And essentially, what it’s going to do is map your name to folder information. So all that’s going to tie names together is making sure that your information on premises, your folder names on premises, map perfectly with the information that’s going to be out there in the cloud.
Okay? So that’s part of this as well. All right. And then you’ve got another thing to note here, which is that this mapping file, this mapping script that you’re running, creates a mapping file that plays a part in performing the export process, so that goes along with it as well. The following item is the set mail public folder external address. So this is just going to update the external email address information for your public folders so that it maps to the Exchange Online public folders. And the last thing you’ve got there is essentially a support file for that. Overall, I recommend wrapping your head around the various little scripts, just the main ones, if you’re performing the migration. The support script commands don’t really matter as far as memorizing what they do, but just have an idea of what each one of these scripts does. And if you’re doing this, make sure that you go to their knowledge base because they’ve got step-by-step instructions on how to perform the actual migration.
