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Enumerating Public Folders using EWS and reporting on Rules and Folder Stats

When people mention Public Folders in Exchange a quote from Mark Twain often comes to mind "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated", one often thinks the same when people write such things about email.  While Groups in Office 365 offer a compelling alternative, Public Folders are still things Admins need to deal with and Migrate occasionally.

While the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets for reporting on Public Folders have improved a lot in Exchange 2013 you may still have the need from time to time to want to do some more in-depth analysis of what's happening in your Public Folders which is where EWS can come in very useful. The one big difference to reporting on folders in a Public Folder Tree vs doing the same thing in a Mailbox is that in a Public Folder tree you can't do a Deep Traversal. This means to report on Public Folders you need to enumerate the child folders of each parent folder with a separate EWS call. For very large Public Folder trees this can take a considerable amount of time.

The following Script does this enumeration for all the Public Folders (that the Mailbox that is running the script) has access to, it checks to see if there are any Rules that are Active or Disabled, and also produces a basic stats report of the Number of Items, FolderSize and also the PidTagLocalCommitTimeMax time which should give you the last time the items in the folder where last changed. eg it produces something like


With this base you can add-in whatever you want to do with each folder depending on your particular requirements.

I've put a copy of this script on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/Powershell-Scripts/blob/master/PublicFolderMod.ps1

To Run the script you need to pass in a Mailbox this is used to connect to CAS server and then connect eg

Enum-PublicFolders -MailboxName mailbox@domain.com
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All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

All code contained herein is provided to you "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind. The implied warranties of non-infringement, merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are expressly disclaimed.