Replicated Public Folders

Public folders can be replicated to other servers in your organization ¾ that is, an identical replica of a public folder can appear on multiple servers. This is called a public folder replica. Replicas contain the same information as the original public folder, but they reside on other Microsoft Exchange Server computers.

The advantages of this configuration are:

• Automatic load balancing for user requests.
• Availability in a wide area network (WAN). Users at sites with no direct connectivity can still share data.
• Fault tolerance.

The disadvantages of this configuration are:

• Possible public folder conflicts
• Latency issues
• Additional message traffic associated with replication

You can replicate a public folder to a server in the same site as the originating server or to servers in other sites. Replicating public folders to other servers in your site is useful for balancing the load of users who are using a specific public folder at any given time.

Replicating public folders to servers in remote sites is a good way to distribute the load to the remote site.

For more information on public folder replication, see "Public Folder Replication Strategies" later in this chapter.