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Making the Most of Public Folders in a Group Account
If you have an Arrowmail Group Account you get your own set of Public
Folders which allows members of your group to have shared access to
non-personal company emails, a company address book, a company diary or
even regular files such as Word documents.
Personal emails still go to your own Inbox which only you have access
to, unless you've specifically allowed another group
member to have access rights to your account - but that's another story.
Public Folders are great and many companies overlook them as they aren't aware of the benefits
they can bring.
If this is you, read on!
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If you have an Individual Account you don't get any Public Folders
because there'd be no point. |
An Example of a Use for Public Folders
If your organisation has the email address sales@mycompany.co.uk,
this could be setup as an alias for one member of your group so that
emails sent to this address go straight into this person's Inbox.
What happens when this person is sick or on holiday, or you want to
know how many emails are arriving at the sales@ address?
A better solution is to have a Public Folder called Sales and "mail
enable" this folder with the address sales@mycompany.co.uk.
Emails sent to this address will now automatically appear in the Sales
folder.
You can set the permissions on this folder for different
members of staff to anything from
Full Control to Folder Invisible:-
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You could have Full Control. |
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Your 2 sales people could have read/write/create/delete permissions. |
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A couple of others might have Read Only access. |
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To everyone else, the Sales folder might be invisible. |
With an Individual Account, you would achieve the same result by
creating a separate folder in your mailbox called Sales, having sales@
as an alias for your main email address and using Outlook Rules to
automatically move emails sent to sales@ into the Sales folder.
Public Folders are Not Just for Emails
The following are some of the other uses for Public Folders:-
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You can have a Contacts Public Folder to provide a
company-wide address list.
Exchange does have a built-in Global Address
List but this is really just internal users of Exchange and doesn't
include customers, suppliers etc. |
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You can have a Calendar Public Folder to act as a company
diary showing things such as staff holidays and other important
events.
A company diary can be used to automatically schedule
meetings and send out meeting requests. |
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You can have a Public Folder that contains regular files such as
Word documents and PDFs.
Storing files in Exchange folders is
called FreeDocs and there's more about this
here. |
Setting up your Public Folder Tree
We create your top-level Public Folder and give it the same name as your group, company
or organisation.
Only the Arrowmail Administrator account has Full
Control of this folder as we don't want you inadvertently making it
visible to other Group Accounts on our server.
Your
Group Administrator has the permission to create sub-folders over which
they will then have full control and everyone in your group can read the
contents of the
top-level folder.
You can copy emails to your top-level folder if you like, but
access permissions to them are fixed so that group members that aren't
administrators will only have Read permission for them.
Every Public Folder has 2 special entries for
which permissions can be set:-
Default and Anonymous.
These entries can't
be deleted from the list of permissions.
Default means any user on our
server not mentioned on the permissions list and Anonymous means a user
who doesn't identify themselves.
On your group's top-level Public
Folder we set Default and Anonymous to have no permissions.
This means
that if you give Default any permissions to any sub-folders you create,
they will only apply to any user on our server who is a member or your
group.
In order for Exchange to be able to deliver emails to a
mail-enabled Public Folder, the folder must have the Contribute
permission assigned to Anonymous.
Because your top-level
Public folder has no permissions assigned to Default or Anonymous, and
only Arrowmail is allowed to change this folder's permissions,
whatever you do to the sub-folders you create, such as
assigning Full Control for Default and Anonymous, nobody outside of your
group, and the Arrowmail Administration Team, will be able to access, or
even be aware of the existence of, your Public Folders.
From within Outlook, you can create an unlimited number of Public Folders
under your top-level folder and then sub-folders, sub-sub-folders etc and
assign access permission to every individual folder for each member of
your group.
You can also delete, rename or move the folders you have created.
We have to mail-enable your public folders for you and you can request
this using the Customer Request Webform.
Just remember not to delete the Contribute permission for Anonymous on any mail-enabled
Public Folders.
Sending a Reply so it Appears to come from a Public Folder's Email Address
instead of Your Email Address
If someone emails sales@mycompany.co.uk you may want to reply
from your own email address to "personalise" your reply and perhaps
establish a relationship with the sender.
At other times it may be more appropriate to replay as
sales@mycompany.co.uk to keep thing more formal and allow other
people, monitoring the Sales Public Folder, to reply to future emails from
this sender.
There are several ways to do this, but we think that setting up a
dummy POP3 account for each alternative Send As address you want is the
easiest way.
Details of how to set this up are here.
How do Emails get into Public folders that aren't Mail-Enabled?
1 - |
You, or someone else in your group,
copies or moves an email from another Public Folder or from one of their own
mailbox folders into a Public Folder.
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2 - |
An automatic process on our server moves
emails to one of your Public Folders.
An example is if you
have opted to have everyone's Probable Spam moved to a
single Public Folder for one person to check for false
positives. |
Generally speaking, mail-enabled Public Folders are
more useful than ones that aren't.
Setting an Age Limit to Items in a Public Folder
Say you have a Public Folder which is mail-enabled to receive
newsletter emails of interest to various members of your staff, and these
newsletters arrive weekly.
If newsletters over 3 months old are no
longer relevant, it can be helpful if such emails are automatically
deleted to keep the Public Folder tidy and not use up your on-line storage
allowance unnecessarily.
For each Public
Folder you can set an age limit to achieve this so, in this case, you'd set it for 90 days.
By default, no emails are automatically deleted from Public Folders no
matter how old they are.
We set the Probable Spam folder, if you have
one, to deleted emails more than 7 days old but you can change this.
Why Can't I see my Group's Public Folder Tree in Outlook?
Public Folders are not displayed by default in Outlook so click:-
Go - Folder… and select Public Folders from the list
and click OK
The Public Folder tree will now appear at the bottom of the left-hand-side Folder List
but the Favorite Folders section in the top-left will have disappeared.
It's one or the other I'm afraid.
To get Favorite Folders back, click:
Go - Mail
The solution is to right-click on each Public Folder you're
interested in and select
Add to Favorites… and click
Add.
Then find this new entry in the Public Folder Favorites
top-level folder and
right-click and select Add to Favorites Folder.
When
you've finished, to hide the Public Folder tree but keep your favourite
ones showing, click Go - Mail
An advantage of this is that
when a new email arrives in a favourite Public Folder, the folder name
in Favorite Folders goes bold to indicate a new unread email.
You don't get a popup and audible notification like you do for a new
personal email but you can get a 3rd party add-on which will do this for
new Public Folder emails.
When you're using Outlook Web Access, there's a Public Folders button
which makes the Public Folder tree open in a new
browser window.
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Official: Microsoft has De-emphasised Public Folders
This means they want you to stop using Public Folders and use, instead, their Sharepoint
server - and just when you were getting the hang of Public Folders!
In practical terms this means with Exchange 2007, which was released
in November 2006, Public folders are:-
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Less convenient to administer because some of the GUI tools have been
removed, which is our problem, not yours. |
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Not Accessible from Outlook Web Access.
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You can also expect that Pubic Folders will be entirely absent from
the version of Exchange that follows Exchange 2007.
Maybe Microsoft are right and Sharepoint provides a better way of
providing a shared information store.
At Arrowmail we plan to offer Exchange 2007 accounts in the near
future because of all their other whizzo features, but we'll continue to
offer Public Folders until we're satisfied that we have a Sharepoint-based
alternative that can provide everything, and more, that Public Folders can today.
There should also be an easy way to upgrade an existing Pubic Folder
setup to Sharepoint.
Extending the use of Public Folders to store regular files, such as
Word documents and PDFs, so that a group of users can access them, is
where things start to get tricky:-
You don't want 2 people editing the same file simultaneously and
independently otherwise the last person to save the file wins and any
changes the other person made will be lost.
This is exactly what Sharepoint has been designed to
address and so should, indeed, be a natural successor to Public Folders.
If only people would listen to Microsoft and start using Sharepoint.
In February 2005 Bill Gates said:-
"SharePoint is one of the most underutilized assets of the
Office system."
^ Top of Page ^
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De-emphasised is a
beautiful management-speak euphemism.
Pray that you
never get de-emphasised. |
