Exchange Server Cookbook: For Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server

2017-07-07 02:10:07

Recipe 9.2. Rehoming Public Folders

Problem

You want to move a folder from one server to another.

Solution

Using a graphical user interface

Launch the Exchange System Manager (Exchange System Manager.msc).

In the left pane, expand the appropriate Administrative Groups container.

Expand the Folders and Public Folders nodes.

Right-click the folder you want to rehome and select Properties.

Switch to the Replication tab.

Click the Add button; when the Select a Public Store dialog box appears, select the server where you want the new replica to be housed, and click OK.

Click OK.

Wait for the public folder content to replicate. The GUI doesn't show any information about replication progress, except that a synchronized folder will be shown as "In Sync" on the Replication tab of the public folder's properties dialog box. Recipe Recipe 9.4 may help.

Verify that the folder replica has appeared in the folder list of the target server.

Optionally, if you want to remove the original replica, repeat steps 2-5, select the original replica, and click Delete.

Using a command-line interface

Get the PFAdmin tool and install it on a machine where you have a MAPI profile (either created by Outlook or by a profile tool like profgen). The account you use to log on must have Exchange Administrator privileges on the routing group that contains the source and target servers.

Use the REHOME option with PFAdmin. You must specify the profile name, the folder name (or ALL if you want to rehome all folders), and the target server where you want the replica to end up. Here is an example:
> pfadmin exAdmin REHOME "Book Suggestions" tornado

Discussion

Rehoming a public folder is simple: you're just moving it from one location to another. To accomplish this, you merely add a replica on the desired server, wait for its contents to replicate, and remove the original. Recipe 9.1 describes a tool that can automate this process for multiple folders, but sometimes all you want is to move a single folder. The process works the same way whether you're rehoming ordinary folders or one of the system folders described in the introduction.

You could easily write your own script to do this, using the code in Recipe 9.10 as a base. However, there are a few quirks. First, your script needs to wait for replication to finish before removing the original. One way to do this is to check and make sure that at least one other server has a replica of the target folder (and that it is a complete and up-to-date replica) before removing the source server's replica. Another, more serious, problem: if you want to move public folders between sites/routing groups in a mixed-mode organization, you have a lot of work to do. In that situation, you'll come out ahead if you rehome your public folders using the PFMigrate script described in Recipe 9.1. As an alternative, you can also use PFAdmin or PFDAVAdmin to do the rehoming for you. In any event, before you rehome any critical folders, it's usually a good idea to make an extra backup, just in case.