Exchange 2007 Managed Folder policies on multiple users

This was a treat for me to find so I'm posting it in hopes it will help save others many valuable hours on google.

There are plenty of articles out there on how to set up Managed folder mailbox policies but my struggle was with how to apply them to a large amount of users in our organization. Typically we like to do things like this based on the Active Directory fields ( in particular the company field).

Here is the power shell command to accomplish this.

Get-Recipient -filter { company -like 'blah'} | set-mailbox -managedfoldermailboxpolicy "empty deleted items"

Another handy command to help you test this out is:

start-managedfolderassistant -mailbox username

Don't forget to schedule a time for the assistant to run. This is found under Server Configuration, Mailbox, Properties of your server, Messaging Records Management tab.

Exchange 2007 Public folder Migration

This year has been the year of the Exchange migration where I work. We're almost done and I'm in the process of making sure everything is off of our Exchange 2003 server. I had followed the instructions here for migrating the public folder store and all seemed well until I dismounted the old public folder store on our Exchange 2003 server and Outlook could no longer connect to public folders.

A little more detail about our setup first. We have E2K3FE, E2K3 backend ( where the old public folders were), E2K7 (CAS,HT), E2K7Mb1(where my mailbox is stored), and E2K7Mb2(where the new public folder store is located).

Further troubleshooting revealed that users with their mailboxes on E2k7Mb2 could open public folders fine with the old public folder store offline.  What I had missed was that I needed to update the Client Settings tab on the E2K7Mb1 mailbox store properties. This setting still had the E2K3backend server listed as the default public folder database. Once I updated that property on the mailbox DBs on the E2K7Mb1 server and restarted Outlook ( a couple times) everything was fine. Hope this post saves others the trouble I went through.