Month: June 2019

ganeshg1990

Safely remove Public folders from Org – Exchange 2013

I am considering that those who are here reading this blog has good understanding about how public folder is structured and how it works in Exchange 2013, If you are pretty new to this I would suggest you to go through Public folders Exchange 2013 before reading further to ensure this is not above your head,

Scale the organization and get the below info,

  • No. of public folders – Getpublicfolderstatistics.ps1 script
  • No. of public folder mailboxes
  • No. of root public folders
  • Get the content mailbox info for each public folder
  • Export the public folder permissions to a csv which can be used if in case we need to restore the public folders and reapply the permissions

Here we are exporting the permissions specific to the root folders along with its sub folders,

$PFroot = read-Host "Enter the Publicfolder-Root"
Write-host "You Entered $PFroot"
Get-PublicFolder "\$PFroot" -Recurse -ResultSize "unlimited" | Get-PublicFolderClientPermission | Select-Object Identity,@{Expression={$_.User};Label="User";},@{Expression={$_.AccessRights};Label="AccessRights";} | Export-Csv C:\Temp\Publicfolderclinetpermission_$PFroot.csv -NoTypeInformation

Once the client permissions are exported, we can remove the permissions on the public folders using the below script,

$removepfroot = read-host "Enter the Root Public folder where the permission has to be removed"
$AllPublicFolders = Get-publicFolder \$removepfroot -recurse

foreach($Pf in $AllPublicFolders )
{
Get-PublicFolderClientPermission $Pf | Foreach{ Remove-PublicFolderClientPermission $_.Identity -User $_.User -Confirm:$false }
}

Then we can remove the public folders via EAC or using EMS,

TechNet has a simple command to remove

What is the Back-out plan ?

I will detail the restoring procedures in my next post, Just an heads up on what will be covered in the upcoming post,

  1. Export the content mailbox information for each public folders
  2. Ways to restore public folders along with the sub folders
  3. How do we restore permissions back into the restored folders

To make it easy one much know about the Primary and Secondary Hierarchy,

Primary Hierarchy – The public folder mailbox that hosts writable copy of the public folder hierarchy. The first public folder mailbox created in an Exchange Organization is the primary hierarchy mailbox

Secondary Hierarchy – All other public folder mailboxes in an Exchange organization, except the primary hierarchy, which store read-only copy of the public folder hierarchy.

Happy Learning !

Cheers,

GaGa