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Markus Bellmann
Senior Solutions Architect, Siemens, Germany
I recently worked with a
client who was migrating from Exchange Server 2003 to Exchange Server
2010. They use public folders extensively; they have 200 GB of data in
almost 18,000 folders, with a total item count of more than 2,000,000
items; one folder alone had more than 125,000 items in it, and there is a
significant amount of data that is more than 5 years old. As cleaning
up their public folder infrastructure would involve working with
multiple business units and persuading them to archive, and the many
discussions about what can or can't be archived, this would have taken a
considerable amount of time and delayed the Exchange Server 2010
project significantly, so they opted to replicate all the data to
Exchange Server 2010 and undertake a public folder cleanup as an ongoing
project at a later date. However, when we began replicating the public
folders from Exchange Server 2003, we discovered that a significant
amount of the content would not replicate; the Exchange Server 2003
information store was sending out folder content backfill messages, but
these messages were failing on the store driver on the Exchange Server
2010 Hub Transport server. The cause was invalid Outlook Categories
being set on the items in public folders; Exchange Server 2010 (as well
as Exchange Server 2007) performs a significant amount of property
validation to keep bad data from getting into the public folder store,
so data that is accepted by Exchange Server 2003 is rejected by Exchange
Server 2010. The invalid categories issue in particular is indicated by
the following event logged on the Hub Transport Server:
Log Name: Application
Source: MSExchange Store Driver
Event ID: 1020
Task Category: MSExchangeStoreDriver
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Description:
The store driver couldn't deliver the public folder replication message
"Folder Content Backfill Response" because the following error occurred:
Property validation failed. Property = [{00020329-0000-0000-c000-
000000000046}:'Keywords'] Categories
Error = Element 0 in the multivalue property is invalid...
This issue is documented on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/01/10/447843.aspx,
and the solution is to simply clear the Category on all of the items
using Outlook; the invalid Categories usually display in Outlook as
"None" and you will see items arranged in two different "None"
Categories. You may have to set them to some other category and then set
them back to None to clear the Categories successfully. Once the
Categories property is truly clear, you'll only have one set of items
that show a Category of "None," and the items will replicate
successfully. Now, the above works in theory, but when you're dealing
with 200 GB of public folder content finding and correcting the items
with invalid Categories through Outlook is simply not feasible. Some
automated approaches were taken using scripting, but creating,
validating and running these scripts took a considerable amount of time
and effort that had to be diverted from the rest of the upgrade project.
The lesson learned in this case was that public folders need to be
managed on an ongoing basis to avoid having them get out of control, and
that you're much better off cleaning up your public folders before
attempting to replicate them to the new system.
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