Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Moving from free-busy information to Availability service

The Public Folder database is created in Exchange 2007 so that you can replicate any Public Folder data stored on your legacy Exchange servers to Exchange 2007. Even though you don’t use Public Folders to store data in your environment, there’s one other reason why you might want to keep the Public Folder database mounted on your Exchange 2007 Server.

As some of you may already know, Exchange 2007 no longer uses a Public Folder (or more specifically a System Folder named SCHEDULE+ FREE BUSY in your Public Folder hierarchy) to store free/busy information for the mailbox users in the organization. Instead free/busy information is stored directly in each user’s mailbox, and retrieved using a new web-based service called the Availability service.

The advantage of this new approach is that there no longer are any 15 minute delays when free/busy time for a user is updated. Instead the update will happen instantly. So why would I want to keep the Public Folder database on my Exchange 2007 server, if free/busy information is retrieved using this new method? Well if you still have legacy Outlook clients (that is Outlook 2003 and earlier versions) running in your organization, these clients still need to use Public Folder method to retrieve free/busy information, since only Outlook 2007 supports the new Availability service.

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