Public Folder Replication Changes in Exchange 2010 Sp1
Published Sep 16 2010 02:40 PM 6,845 Views

Many of you who have migrated or are still migrating public folders from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 or 2010 have run into replication failures due to property validation. This validation was first introduced in Exchange 2007, and I initially blogged about some those issues in this old post on EHLO. I later posted a script on my personal blog that fixes some of those problems, and described another troubleshooting technique here.

While the validation was good in that it kept 'bad' items out of your shiny new public stores, the items usually weren't 'bad' in a way that a user would ever notice. Maybe they had a null Category, or the PR_SENDER_NAME was empty, or the start/end dates on an appointment weren't all in sync. And while my script fixes a few of the problems, some of the problems can't be fixed and the item simply has to be deleted.

For any of you still struggling with these issues, I have good news. Exchange 2010 SP1 completely turns off validation for items in public folder replication messages. Once you apply SP1, any public folder replication problems due to validation will simply go away.

Of course, this means that on your new public stores you might end up with items that have bad Category values and similar problems. If you like, you can still use my script to correct some of those problems, but in most cases the users never notice them anyway.

Exchange 2010 SP1 will make life a lot easier for anyone still migrating public folders from Exchange 2003. We are evaluating a similar fix for Exchange 2007.

Bill Long

8 Comments
Not applicable
Please give me an address to send a lifetime supplies of cookies and donuts to whomever green-lighted this.  Consultants the world over rejoice.
Not applicable
Hey Bill, that is pretty awesome news to hear.
Not applicable
Ahhhhh...... awesome to hear, but 2 months too late! Categories killed my replication and it took a large manual effort to get them replicating. Thanks Guys, i'm already loving SP1.
Not applicable
do we know if this will be ported over to Exch 2007?  we've had the simillar issue migrating PF from 2003 servers.  so we're keeping hem around just to host the PF.

We'd like to get rid of them.
Not applicable
Would be great if you could provide some better information for:

"The store driver couldn't deliver the public folder replication message "Folder Content Backfill Response (EXCHANGE-IS@mydomain.com)" because the following error occurred: The message content has become corrupted.."

I have no clue how to solve this (and how to find the "corrupted" message in hundreds of thousands of folders). Helpful would be to say: Message "this is the subject of a mail" in Folder "Foo/bar" has been corrupted and need a repair. Aside - an autorepair would be better... I do not have an idea how a message could be corrupt.
Not applicable
@Bill

Thanks for the Neat tool and fix in Sp1 in E2K10, Its a nightmare in E2k3 to touch public folder Issues, Migration of PF, Checking Sitefolder server Attribute.....and the list continues......
Not applicable
so we have Ex03 and Ex2010 and were missing PF data in Ex2010 that was visable in Ex03. We have installed Ex2010 SP1 but are still missing data that is visable from a Ex03 account. How do we force a synchronization from Ex03 to 2010 after SP1 is installed?
Copper Contributor

Hello Team, 

 

This question is to give confirmation for some customers who still have 3-4TB of PF databases on exchange 2010. Does changing path of PF DB via adsiedit or management console to new drive , trigger public folder replication in any way. 

DB is clean shutdown, we need to move it to new bigger drive. 

moving DB to new drive offline method , does it trigger full replication or partial replication  

 

Thank you

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