Public Folders tend to be a huge annoyance for most Exchange administrators. They are one of those pieces of Exchange that many admins don't know very well and aren't touched very often. I can't tell you how many times I've asked a client:
"How often are your Public Folders used? And how much stale data is in them?"
Only to receive a blank stare or (rarely) an honest answer of "I have absolutely no idea."
Well this can be easily rectified by using PowerShell and a couple of commands!
The three PF commands we're going to use are:
- Get-PublicFolder
- This command allows us to get the public folder tree
- Get-PublicFolderStatistics
- This will get the statistics for the PF itself.
- Get-PublicFolderItemStatistics
- This one gives us the statistics of the items in a PF
What I do to get an idea of what's in use in the PF structure, is to start by getting a list of the PFs and then going through the list and looking at the contents of each PF. If there is an item with a LastModificationTime from the last three years we'll consider that "in use" and then get the statistics of the PF.
You should decide what constitutes "in use" for your organization, in this example three years was decided as the cut off..
While this is a really simple method, it can give you great insight into the actual utilization on your Public Folders.
Now instead of asking the Marketing Department "Do you use the Marketing Public Folder?" and being told that ".....it's a vital part of our department and cannot be deleted." , you can answer with:
"Strange then that it hasn't changed since 2005."
Or more diplomatically:
"That's great, it looks like static content that has not changed since 2005. If you really need the data in it we can work with you to find a better solution for your needs, such as moving the data to a long term file store or possibly a SharePoint site."
Of course I don't manually do any of this. I simply run a script I created to do it for me!
The script will output two files, with the public folder statistics for either the Old or In-Use public Folders.
Here's the link for the script on GitHub:
https://github.com/mikecessna/GetOldPFs/
Labels: exchange 2010, powershell, public folders