Exchange 2016 Public Folders quick setup

Purpose of this quick article today is to show the steps to help creating the Exchange 2016 Public Folders. This article follows a series dedicated to installing Microsoft Exchange 2016 in a home lab.

Public folders can grow very large and proper capacity planning is advised to limit potential loss of data due to a lack of adequate resources. From this perspective creating dedicated Mailbox Databases is strongly advised. The steps below show how to:

• Create a new Mailbox Database
• Create a Public folder Mailbox
• Create Public Folders Hierarchy

From the Exchange ECP page let’s navigate to Servers > Databases and click add button to create a new Mailbox database to dedicate to Public Folders. Let’s also make sure the checkbox “Mount this Database” is selected.

Let’s remember to restart the Exchange Information Store Service afterwards to acknowledge the new Mailbox Database. Now we navigate to the Public Folders > Public Folders Mailboxes to create the first one as per the screenshot below on the “+” button.

The idea in this example is to create a sort of hierarchy with something similar to EMEA and then within this one to create a series Exchange 2016 Public folders based on Departments.

We are now ready to create the Public Folder Structure using the pertinent link as per screenshot below.

Let’s use the Department as an example.

From here we can now add the permissions from the Manage link.

Let’s choose a user and grant the desired permissions. Of course to the Administrator we want to leave the Default Full Control by choosing the “Owner” Permission level.

We can add more if needed and with a different set of Permission levels.

We can now create a set of sub-folders for example by Department as per screenshots below. The first one can be the “IT Support” sub-folder.

And then another one for Marketing and other departments we want to use.

Of course for each one of them it is possible to have separate permissions and settings.

At this point if we want to use the Exchange 2016 Public Folders (for Post and Calendar events) from the OWA the next steps show how to add these Public Folders. Outlook client will automatically display the pertinent ones based on login credentials.

Let’s do a right click on Favourites and choose the “Add Public Folder to Favourites” option.

At this point we can select the appropriate one.

The Public Folder will be added and depending on permissions will also allow operations as per Permission levels.

This concludes the steps on how to create and add Exchange 2016 Public Folders and access them through OWA.