There’s a new tool out from the Exchange Team that you should know about. It’s a guided walkthrough for troubleshooting public folder replication in Exchange 2003. Yes, that’s right, a tool for a version of Exchange that is in extended support, and should be well on its way to retirement. Why should you care about something for a product that is near the end of its support lifecycle? There’s a couple of reasons actually. If you have any Exchange 2003 still in your environment, read on.
Public folders in Exchange 2003 serve two main purposes, both of which were superseded by newer and better ways to do things in Exchange 2007 and beyond. The first is the sharing of Free/Busy information between users. Free/Busy information in Exchange 2003 is stored in a Public Folder database. When you move to Exchange 2010 or even Office 365, you need to ensure that this public folder information is replicated between your Exchange 2003 servers and your Exchange 2010 server on-prem, if you want Free/Busy sharing to work between users. While some customers may choose to do without F/B for the time it takes to complete migration, for others this may not be acceptable. Troubleshooting Public Folder replication can help you to resolve issues sharing F/B between the legacy and new environments.
Public folders are also key parts of many business processes. There’s a reason so many customers are still on Exchange 2003, and why Microsoft decided to bring public folders back into prominence in both Exchange 2013 and the new version of Exchange Online in Office 365-lacking that, too many customers would never upgrade. Of course, to use public folders with either, you need to migrate that data from the older 2003 servers to a 2010 server. I’ve learned from experience that if you try to move data from an unhealthy location, you are going to fail, so getting public folder replication healthy is a critical pre-step before you begin any migration.
The Public Folder Replication troubleshooter can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/common/survey.aspx?scid=sw;en;3221&showpage=1 and is a guided walkthrough of the steps to follow when trying to diagnose and resolve issues with any public folder replication scenario. It includes both step by step instructions and links to other articles and is designed to walk you through, step by step, the methodology to follow when working with Public Folder replication issues.
The first steps are to enable both diagnostic logging and message tracking. These are critical components for troubleshooting public folder replication. It then helps you to narrow your attentions to a single pair of servers-one with data and one missing. Based on answers to questions, the walkthrough quickly determines whether the issues is one of hierarchy or content, and then focuses your efforts in the appropriate direction. Based on actions you are directed to take, and answers to further questions regarding results or event log entries, the walk through gets to the steps needed to take to resolve most issues. These may include command line configuration tools like netdom or isinteg, or changes to settings within Windows firewall or DNS.
Exchange 2003 has been out for so long, and has been so widely deployed, that the guided walkthrough can address practically any issue that might come up with public folder replication. What’s exciting to note is that in the introduction to the tool, the Exchange team indicates that this is only the first iteration of the tool, and that components for both Exchange 2007 and 2010 will be coming. Why not 2013 you ask? Because the mechanisms used to replicate public folder data in Exchange 2013 are significantly different from its predecessors, but that is a post for another time. Until then, if you hare having any issues with public folders in your Exchange 2003 environment, use the guided walkthrough to fix them.
New Tool For Troubleshooting Exchange 2003 Public Folder Replication
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