5. Creating public folders
With the appropriate permissions in place to prevent the
wholesale creation of public folders through Outlook, you can now lay
out the structure of the public folder hierarchy and create the folders
in which users will store content. For the purpose of illustration, I
use a simple folder structure based on the departments that exist
within the organization and create a single top-level folder for each
department, which results in folders with names such as Sales,
Marketing, Operations, and so on. The intention is to create subfolders
under these folders to reflect the interests and needs of the people
who work in the various departments. IT might have folders for major
projects such as the deployment of Exchange 2013, whereas Sales might
have folders for sales campaigns. The idea is that you create the basic
skeleton of the hierarchy in a way that eases assignment of permissions
over sections of the hierarchy to users who then control the content,
which leads to the situation illustrated in Figure 5
in which the Analytics public folder is created under the Departments
folder. Remember, an Exchange administrator never creates content in a
public folder: administrators create and manage the hierarchy; users
manage content.
Creating
a new public folder with EMS is done with the New-PublicFolder command.
For instance, here’s how to create a public folder called
Administration under the Departments folder:
New-PublicFolder –Name 'Administration' –Path '\Departments'
To
be more precise, pass the name of the mailbox in which you want
Exchange to create the folder; otherwise, the folder will be created in
the mailbox that holds the primary copy of the hierarchy. Of course,
you can move the folder afterward, but it is better to put it in the
correct place from the start. A better command is therefore something
like this, which puts the new folder in the PF-Departments public
folder mailbox:
New-PublicFolder –Name 'Administration' –Path '\Departments' –Mailbox 'PF-Departments'
Figure 6
shows a set of public folders in EAC, including those EAC creates and
the one that was created previously with EMS. You can also see that the
IT folder is slightly different because it is stored in the PF-IT-MBX
mailbox, whereas all the other folders use the PFMbx1 mailbox.
These
public folders are empty and will remain in this state until users
begin to populate the folders with content. Exchange does not support
the ability for an administrator to import information into a public
folder in the same way that you can import data from a PST into a user
mailbox, so you rely on users to create content in the public folders
through a client. Figure 7
shows the set of public folders that you’ve created as viewed through
Outlook 2013. Users can post items to the folders, email items to
mail-enabled public folders, or drag and drop items from other folders
into the public folders.
You
can also access public folders, but only modern public folders, through
Outlook Web App. This client takes a different approach than Outlook
does; you have to add the public folders with which you want to work to
your Favorites (the list
containing folders such as Inbox and Sent Items). Then, you can access
content in the public folders that you have chosen or post new items.
The approach Outlook Web App takes might seem surprising because every
other client that has ever accessed public folders has allowed users to
browse through the complete hierarchy. The argument is that it is more
efficient to select the folders you want to access and be able to
select them quickly through Favorites than having to open and navigate
down what could be a very large and complex hierarchy to arrive at the
desired public folder. In addition, if you add a public folder to your
Favorites with Outlook Web App, Outlook also displays it as a Favorite
(and vice versa) because the two clients share a common set of
Favorites.
