Hello Folks,

I have a customer who is currently running Exchange 2007 and wants to upgrade to Exchange 2013 (single server setup, on-premise). The customer excessively uses public folders and there is no realistic chance to change the workflow in the near future.

Just to give you an idea: i'm talking about ~ 70.000 public folders, increasing ~12.000 per year.

There is a relatively static folder structure:

\Year\Project\Subfolder

Each Project has 3 subfolders, ~4000 Projects generated each year. PF structure is maintained by a service.

As you can see, i'm currently (at least) running into the "do not create more than 1000 subfolders in a parent folder" limitation.

I'm confident that i can split up the existing folders into appropiate number of PF Mailboxes during the migration to Exchange 2013 (please correct me if you see complications here!), the main question for me is: how can i ensure that the PF limitations will be observed when Exchange 2013 is up and running?

So my questions are:

* are there any built in "balancing" mechanisms in Exchange 2013 that might do the job "automatically" for me?

i.e. automatically create new Project-subfolders in a different PF-Mailbox when the count of 1000 subfolders in the current PF-mailbox is reached? I know that there is a "per user-mailbox" balancing mechanism through the DefaultPublicFolderMailbox setting, but this won't help in my case, because PF-structure is set-up and maintained by a central service.

* If such mechanisms do not exist, do you see a chance to script a "balancing mechanism"

I'm thinking of a scheduled task which checks the Project-subfolder counts and triggers something as soon as the 1000 folder limit has been reached - what could that "something" be? Changing the "DefaultPublicFolderMailbox" setting of the user which maintains PF structure? Or do i have to issue MoveRequests for each newly created project which i want to store in a "fresh" PF-mailbox?

I'd be glad for any hints you have.

thanks in advance,

yours,

Juergen

• Edited by jpichlbauer Wednesday, February 11, 2015 5:01 PM

Hi,

Based on my knowledge, in Exchange 2013, the recommended maximum number of sub-folders is 1000. This is the level that has been validated. You can use the FolderHierarchyChildrenCountReceiveQuota parameter on the Set-Mailbox cmdlet to set the value. The mailbox owner wont be able to create a new subfolder when this limit is reached.

You can refer to the folowing articles.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2014/08/26/public-folder-updates-in-cu6-improving-scale-and-more.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn594582(v=exchg.150).aspx

Hope this is helpful to you.

Best regards,

Hello Belinda,

I guess i did not point out my interpretation of the available MS documentation on PF limitations correctly in my first post:

As the FolderHierarchyChildrenCountReceiveQuota is a mailbox specific command (which is not even just related to public folders, as you also stated), i am assuming (although this is sadly not fully documented by MS) that the recommendation of 1000 subfolder per parent-folder is a "per public-folder-mailbox" limitation and can be avoided by creating subfolders of a parent folder in different PF-mailboxes.

If - contrary to my thought - this is a public folder hierarchy based recommendation, then I guess there's no other way than to adopt the PF-structure of our customer to observe this recommendation.

thanks,

Juergen

• Edited by jpichlbauer 2 hours 58 minutes ago