Understanding Public Folders

Within an organization, collaboration between two or more parties is essential. If two individuals are exchanging information, e-mail is a suitable format. When more than two individuals are involved, a discussion format is more appropriate. However, when users need to access documents and files for a working project, public folders provide an ideal solution.

A public folder stores messages or information that can be shared among users in your organization. Public folders can contain different types of information, ranging from custom forms to Internet content stored in its native format. Public folders are a part of the information store that Exchange clients, Web browsers, and custom applications can access. Access to folders can be controlled by setting permissions and optimized by replicating folders to other servers in your organization.

Public folders include many features that make Exchange a complete collaboration server:

• Multiple store support. The public folder hierarchy can be configured into smaller logical units to reflect departments in an organization. In addition to the default public folder hierarchy, you can create other top-level folder hierarchies. Each folder hierarchy is represented by its own database in the information store. The information store supports multiple public stores running under a single process. Multiple stores increase scalability by allowing you to segment the folder data and distribute it across servers in your organization.
• Web exposure. Each public folder has an HTML page associated with it. When a folder is created, Exchange automatically creates a default HTML page. You can replace the automatically generated Web page with a custom page or you can change the URL to point to another Web site. In addition to the folder container, all contents within a folder are exposed by a dynamically generated URL.
• Replication. A public folder can be configured to have copies on multiple servers. Replicas are useful for distributing the user load on servers, distributing public folders across geographical areas, and backing up public folder data. You can set up a replication schedule based on how often data in the public folder changes. You can set this schedule for all public folders or for a specific public folder.
• Affinity. When a client must use an alternate server to access public folder content, Exchange uses a routing group that is configured to refer the client to another server. This allows the client to access content when a specific server is not known. It also eliminates the need for a cost-based referral list. Because routing groups are intended to serve as collections of well-connected servers, the connections between all servers in a routing group are likely to be of the same bandwidth.