Public Folders - Remove after leaving org.

[ChuckG]

I have an exchange 5.5 server sp3 that recently we left our old organization and have become a stand alone server.

There are several (12-15) public folders that we got during the replication process. Now that we are no longer part of that organization we do not have the ability to change permissions, delete, hide any of these.

I've gone through the MS Knowledge base and tried the "Removing Orphaned Public Folders" solution which didn't work.

Anyone have any idea's for getting rid of these public folders? I would like to just completly delete them, I'm not concerned with any of the data within them.

Thanks
ChuckG

 

[DFRA603]

I thing you'll need to enable 'public folder re-homing'

Kind Regards,

David



From Technet:

If someone decides to change the way the two sites are connected or a connector that links the two sites is having a problem, the replication link between the servers is usually broken. The two servers suddenly don't know about each another. The Canberra server does not know about the Vancouver server.

If the Consistency Adjuster is run, it goes through the information store and cleans it up. It notices the Home Server named Vancouver, and says "I don't know of a Vancouver server," and re-homes the folder to the local server. Now there are essentially have two separate folders rather than a replicated folder. One is homed to Vancouver and one to Canberra. If the sites are left independent forever, this situation is okay. If the sites need to continue sharing the Sales folder, it needs to be repaired.

When the sites are reconnected, the folders need to be brought back into sync. The Canberra server made the last changes, so its information needs to be replicated back to the Vancouver server. The Vancouver re-homes itself to name the Canberra server the Home Server. This is okay so far. But when the Consistency Adjuster runs again, it removes unknown users and destroys the Public Folder permission structure.

Exchange 5.0 prevents re-homing through a feature called Limited Administrative Home Access. If this feature is on, the Canberra server, when it tries to re-home to the local server, would simply purge the local copy. This feature prevents re-homing by deleting the replica folder rather than allowing the re-home procedure to proceed. It also prevents the unauthorized pulling of replicas, mentioned earlier.

 

[ChuckG]

After reading some information about the Limited Administrative Home Access function, I took a look at it.

The problem with our situation is that these public folders that I'm trying to remove I can't get to the properties page to turn that function on or off.

From the server it says, when you try and view the properties for one of the public folders, "The object cannot be found in the directory ID no:c1010aae "

 

[ChuckG]

I was doing some reading about the PFADMIN utility that comes with the Exchange Resource Kit. Would this be of any use to me in this proceedure, and is there anyway to obtain a copy of this utility until I can get a copy of the Resource Kit?

 

[Guest_imported]

One way to remove the public folders:
-start the exch admin
-go into the folder properties, make yourself the owner in client perms
-start outlook on your local machine
-right click on the folder you want to delete
-select delete

 

[ChuckG]

I've gotten this solved. Even had some tech's at Microsoft stumped for a bit.

We wound up stoping the Information Store service and just renaming the pub.edb then when we re-started it, it re-created a empty store.