I agree with you, this is not the best solution by far. The customer will tell its users that all other folders, including tasks and the calendar, are not private and that only the private folder will be 'private/personal'
The user will perhaps, or even probably, assume that the folder will never be looked at by IT, while in fact it would probably indeed be the first folder IT would look in, in case of trouble. If it would have been my choice it would have been another solution but I didnt have the final say in this one. Sometimes you aren't in the position to give the definite answer and you are simply only executing orders. We have probably all been in that position and sometimes still are. I am interested in the technical aspect of the matter, the script itself and the technical possibilities and difficulties that come to play, like not being able to set a quota to a seperate folder in Exchange 2003. Brian, you pointed out to me that Exchange 2007 does offer this functionality so I checked it out and I came accross 'managed folders', interesting: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/E2k7Help/859e437b- 44b2-4203-883e-cb8c365973fd.mspx?mfr=true Thank you also for pointing me to two 3rd party application who offer exactly this functionality but customer chooses not to implement them for various reasons, additional costs being the most significant one. I agree it would indeed be better to have this tacked onto a script to mailbox enable/mailbox connect users, but I know this will be refused because, as you pointed out, this creates a dependency (the customers IT department who will have to execute the script). So it will probably come down to a script which will run a couple of times a day, checking all mailboxes for the existence of the folder and if not present, adding it. We are talking about 1 server, not experiencing any performance problems (containing two 3.6 GHz Xeon procs, 4 gig of mem and hosting 400 mailboxes). Looking at the initial script that was suggested by Mathieu: set olApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application") set inbox = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").getDefaultFolder(6) set temp5 = inbox.folders.add("Private",6) This creates a folder under the inbox folder. how would the last line look like if the folder would have to be created in the root of the mailbox? I have been checking more into the details of the script myself and ran into this article: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310244 But I cannot seem to find how to refer to the root of the mailbox. I am probably missing something but I dont see in this script which users will be affected by the script, to who it will apply, like 'domain.com' for instance. This could be particularly interesting to use for testing, if it would be possible to apply it to only one user for instance, by specifying a dn for instance. Is it possible to add these additions to the script? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- From: "joe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 09:45:31 -0400 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- This sounds kooky. What does the customer intend to do with the rest of the mailbox or how do they intend to specially treat the private folder? What about the calendar and tasks? Private or not? Currently there really isn't a good technical solution to this. About the best is that you tack onto the end of the script you use to mailbox enable users and it logs into the mailbox so it gets instantiated and then creates the folder; you can't specify Exchange to create a folder once the mailbox is instantiated later. As Brian indicated, you also can't set a quota on the folder. Now with the above you still have the issue of people not using your script to mailbox enable users (or say doing a mailbox reconnect) so at some point you would have to be scanning mailboxes looking for that folder and adding it if missing. Depending on the number of mailboxes this could be something that has to be constantly running because it can take a long time to log in and check all of those mailboxes. Personally I hate writing scripts that loop through all mailboxes like that as they always seem to get screwed up after a bit. The whole programmatic aspect of Exchange mailboxes and logging into them, etc is flakey and slow, IMO. Probably the better solution is just to tell people, hi, if you get private or personal email, create a folder called private and put it in there. The rest of your mailbox is not considered private and we will be xxxxxxx. Where the xxxxxx is whatever it is the customer intends to do with the rest of the mailbox or how they expect to treat the private folder differently from the rest of the mailbox. Personally again, I say it is all kooky. IMO, when you really get down to it, none of a business mailbox is private/personal. The company can go into any part of any mailbox any time they want. They have legal obligations to do so in some cases and in other cases it could become necessary for troubleshooting. If the customer thinks administrators will just avoid those folders when working on mailboxes they are almost certainly wrong, if anything, if you have an admin who does that kind of perusing, that would be the first place they would go hunting in. -- O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition - http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of victor- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 5:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] Add folder with quota to existing mailboxes - via scripting or tool Thanks Brian and Mathieu, I will tell a little bit more about the background of this. The customer has asked for a folder called "private" to be created in the root of every users mailbox and if possible set a quota to this folder. After this has been done, the customer wants to instruct his users to use only this folder only as their personal/private email folder and move everything that the users sees as being private, to the private folder. From that moment on, all other folders in the users mailboxes are no longer considered as private/personal. I do have some additional questions: - how would the script look if the requirement would be to create the folder in the root. - The way the script is set up now, do I have to set up which users this script will apply to, I mean will it now apply to all users in the entire domain which are mailbox enabled? - Is there any way that I can specify which users this script has to be applied to, I mean can I run it against all mailbox enabled users in a specific OU? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------- Re[2]: [ActiveDir] Add folder with quota to existing mailboxes - via scripting or tool From: Mathieu CHATEAU <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 00:24:47 +0200 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- Hello Victor, If the folder already exist, it will simply do nothing, except going into errors.. need to add a on error resume next or test if the folder exist before. will create in the inbox, as a subfolder I don't see your goal with this folder...except if you turn special rights on it. may ask them to put it [private] in the subject instead (it will work for the sent folders) Regards, Mathieu CHATEAU http://lordoftheping.blogspot.com Sunday, August 27, 2006, 10:26:59 PM, you wrote: Thanks Mathieu, nice. Does this create a folder in the root of the mailbox? Access all mailboxes you say, that sounds logical. I know that domain admins indeed dont actually have the full mailbox access (they have some denies). What if a user already has the folder, does this script take this into account? Again thanks. Victor From: Mathieu CHATEAU [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: zondag 27 augustus 2006 22:04 To: Victor W. Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Add folder with quota to existing mailboxes - via scripting or tool Hello Victor, you will at least need an account that can access all mailboxes (not a domain admins one) (or give a script to everyone that they will execute) To my knowledge, quota is mailbox based. You may set up a special retention on this folder. sample _vbscript_ to create the private folder set olApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application") set inbox = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI").getDefaultFolder(6) set temp5 = inbox.folders.add("Private",6) hope it helps, Regards, Mathieu CHATEAU http://lordoftheping.blogspot.com Sunday, August 27, 2006, 8:57:03 PM, you wrote: Does anybody know what is the 'best' way to add automatically a folder to existing mailboxes and set a quota on that same folder? We would like all our users to get a folder called "private" added to the root of their mailbox and if possible, a quota to be set to that folder. Can this be done by scripting easily or is there perhaps even a tool which is capable of doing this? This also counts for new, still to be created users. I mean, every user that will be created will have to have that certain folder added to his or her mailbox. Offcourse this could be done by running the script a couple of times a day, checking if the folder exists allready and if not, adding it. Or perhaps it can even by realised the moment a user has been created. Any ideas are greatly appreciated. List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------- List info : http://www.activedir.org/List.aspx List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/ListFAQ.aspx List archive: http://www.activedir.org/ml/threads.aspx
