Public Folders

The following tools are useful for maintaining public folders.

Public Folder Ownership Fix Utility In many large organizations, the ownership and responsibility for public folders is delegated to the public folder requestor. An entry in the Address Book shows who owns the public folder. In addition to the person who requested that the public folder be created, you should consider adding a second owner of the public folder - a global, public folder administrator distribution list. By adding the global, public folder administrator distribution list as an owner of a public folder, you can track the status messages on the public folder. Because the person who owns the public folder has sufficient permissions to remove the distribution list from the public folder owners, it is recommended that you develop a tool to reset this ownership and add the distribution list to those public folders from which the it has been removed.

Public Folder Reporting Utility Tracking public folder usage is important for numerous reasons, for example, capacity planning and successful load leveling across servers. The following are important areas to monitor:

• Search for all public folders owned by a given user or having other attributes, such as what forms are in the folder library, and so on.
• Report of public information store database growth over a time period.
• Replication volume, by folder and time period.
• Folder owner report/query tool.
• Disk space used by public folder or hierarchy.
• Report of access to public folders by user. This is useful for determining when to replicate a public folder to a remote location to conserve WAN bandwidth.
• Report, by folder, of number of new postings, and breakdown of post type. For example, normal, attachments, and forms.
• Report, by server, of number of new folders created.
• Report, by folder/tree of folders, of number of messages and total K used.
• Report, by folder, of number of accesses per time period.
• Report/query of last access date and time. For example, all folders not accessed in the last month.
• Report/query of the last date and time a folder had items posted in it. Searchable as above.
• Security auditing tool. For example, find all folders that have forwarding rules installed. Messages could be sent to the Internet that you don't want to be distributed outside of your organization.