Public Folders

Exchange Public Folders were at risk of decapitation some years ago. Successive Exchange releases didn't add much to the original Public Folders functionality. This is changing in Exchange 2013 however.

The first time we select the Public Folders category we are greeted with an error:

This alerts us that no active public folder mailbox was found. The error perfectly summarizes the key change Exchange 2013 is introducing. Public Folders no longer have their own database store. Instead everything is stored within a dedicated mailbox created specifically for this purpose.

We now only have one database type to manage, the Mailbox Database. This also means that the same High Availability functionality employed for mailboxes (DAGs) is now also applicable to Public Folders.

So after closing the error, we move to the Public Folders Mailboxes page and click Add to create our first public folder mailbox:

With that in place we can now go to the Public Folders page and start building the folder hierarchy. So I click Add to create a couple of folders under the root.

After creating a folder, we can go back and edit the various properties assigned by default. Here are the properties of the Support folder just created: