Why to replicate public folders?
The most common reason to replicate public
folders is to make the public folder data on one Exchange server
available locally to another Exchange server. This allows users
connecting to the second Exchange server to access the public folder
data without going across the network to the first server. This
type of replication is only available between servers within the
same Exchange organization. It can be configured using Exchange
System Manager (ESM). Another reason to replicate public folders is
when a server is being retired. In this case the public folders on
the server being retired need to be replicated, or moved, to another
server. This is also done using ESM when the servers all exist
within the same Exchange organization. Exchange 2003 SP2 makes this
second process easy using the Manage Settings Wizard and the
?Replace Server? option.
When a company\organization has more than one
Exchange organization or needs to migrate to a new Exchange
organization, normally due to a merge or migration from Exchange
5.5, the standard tools do not provide away to migrate public
folders across organizations. In such cases if the organization is
fairly small and doesn?t use public folders often they could simply
export public folder data to a PST and then import the public folder
data into their new Exchange organization. This method is quick and
easy but doesn?t keep public folder data in sync between the two
Exchange organizations. Because of this fact this method will not
work for most organizations or migrations.
The Inter-Organization Replication Tool
If an organization has a need to keep users in
multiple Exchange organizations for any period of time and wants to
have public folder changes replicated between them there is only one
real solution from Microsoft. That solution, or tool, is called the
?Inter-Organization Replication Tool?, which was first released with
Exchange 5.5 SP3. It can be downloaded from Microsoft at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/downloads/2003/tools.mspx.
Its name is a bit misleading since the tool only
replicates public folder content between two Exchange
servers. A better name would be something like ?Inter-Organization
Public Folder Content Replication Tool.? In this article I call the
tool ?Exchsync? for short.
This tool is made up of two executable. The
first one, exscfg.exe, is used to create a configuration file which
defines what public folders should be replicated and the settings
used for the replication. The second one, exssrv.exe, is used to
install the service to do the actual replication. Below I am going
to go over basic steps to setup this tool but I am also going to
cover the pre-requisites steps needed to get the tool to work
correctly.
There is one major limitation of the
Inter-Organization Replication Tool. This is the fact that it does
not replicate the permissions set on public folders. This makes
sense since the same accounts, at least their SID, can?t exist in
two Exchange 200 x organizations due to the fact that only one
Exchange 200x organization can exist within a single forest. In
addition, Microsoft changed the permissions structure on public
folders with Exchange 200x. In the steps below I will cover
exporting the public folder permissions to a file which can be
referenced later when manually recreating the permissions.
In this article I won?t be covering all the
details on setting up the Inter-Organization Replication Tool since
these are covered in the documentation included with the tool. What
I will be coving is what needs to be done to prepare Exchange for
the tool to work and what needs to be done after the tool is
configured, mainly settings the permissions on the target folders. |
