What are Public Folders?
A public folder is a shared collaboration space where users can hold threaded discussions, share documents, create drop folders and more. A folder owner sets the permissions to designate who can access that folder and how they can use it. A folder can be set to allow everyone on the Exchange system to view items in it, or it can be restricted to department members, or small groups can view it. More information is available at Exchange Public Folders.
Public folders are storage areas on public information stores. They are used to collect, organize, and share information among users in an organization. They provide a permanent storage place. Moreover, they can be used to post information on an electronic bulletin board and store sharable items, i.e., calendars and contacts, etc. Public folders can be created and configured in an Exchange organization by administrators and other users who have sufficient access permissions. In an Exchange Server 2003 server, a Public folder can be created from the Exchange System Manager console.
For the administrator, public folders are a separate database. Figure 1 This screenshot shows the Exchange databases on a single Exchange 2003 Standard server. The priv1 database, composed of both an EDB and an STM file, contains the user mailboxes. The pub1 database contains the public folders. Both databases in Exchange 2000 and in Exchange 2003 up to SP2 had a limit of 16GB. In the fast moving Internet days, 16GB is not much. However, most mail accumulates in user mailboxes, leaving the public folder database pretty empty. Later on I will show how public folders can be better used to even this out, so you get a smaller mailbox database and more room to grow. Public Folders contain the same type of folders you can access using Outlook, and can hold mail, calendaring and task information. You can set security on these folders so that only specific people will have specific types of access to these folders.
