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Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Unable to expand Exchange 2010 public folders from an Exchange 2016 hosted mailbox with Outlook 2016

Problem

You’ve used the following TechNet article to allow Exchange 2016 mailboxes to access your Exchange 2010 public folders during a migration:

Configure legacy public folders where user mailboxes are on Exchange 2013 servers
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn690134(v=exchg.150).aspx

You’ve confirmed that Outlook 2010 and 2013 clients are able to expand the Exchange 2010 hosted public folders but the following error messages are displayed when attempting to expand with Outlook 2016:

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Cannot expand the folder. The set of folders cannot be opened. Network problems are preventing connection to Microsoft Exchange.

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The set of folders cannot be opened. Network problems are preventing connection to Microsoft Exchange.

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***Note that it is not accurate to test via Exchange 2016 OWA because it would not be able to proxy requests over to Exchange 2010 so you are guaranteed to receive the following error if you try opening the public folders:

Can’t complete your request

No public folders are available. Check that a public folders deployment exists in this Exchange organization. If so, please try again later

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Solution

This issue had me stumped for half a day because attempting to search this error message with the combintation of Exchange 2010, 2016 and Outlook 2016 returns many other KBs and forum posts that are unrelated to the issue.  After a bit more searching with different strings, I managed to find the solution in the following KB:

Outlook can't access public folders hosted on legacy Exchange servers
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3177600/outlook-can-t-access-public-folders-hosted-on-legacy-exchange-servers

Executing the following cmdlet on an Exchange 2016 hosted mailbox displays the DefaultPublicFolderMailbox field as being blank:

Get-Mailbox tluk | FL *public*

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Use the following cmdlet as described in the KB to define the proxy mailbox that was created for Exchange 2016 users to access the Exchange 2010 public folders:

Set-Mailbox <User> -DefaultPublicFolderMailbox <ProxyMailbox>

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Execute the following cmdlet to assign the public folder database for the user's mailbox database:

Set-MailboxDatabase (Get-Mailbox <User>).Database -PublicFolderDatabase (Get-MailboxDatabase (Get- Mailbox <ProxyMailbox>).Database).PublicFolderDatabase

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Complete the above steps by executing the following cmdlet to restart the Microsoft Exchange Rpc Client Access service on the server that's running Exchange Server that hosts the public folders:

Restart-Service MSExchangeRPC

With the above completed, the Outlook 2016 client should now be able to expand the public folder structure:

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Awesome article. Fixed my issue that I've been struggling with for days. My only concern is that when I am complete with my migration to Exchange 2016 and I migrate my Public Folder databases to Exchange 2016 will I need to reset the public folder assignments for each of the mailboxes that I migrate? If so how do I do that?

Unknown said...

Any update on question above as I have the same concern?

Anonymous said...

Thank you!! This was driving me nuts, spent a day on it and didn't get anywhere.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much, it helped me a LOT!

steve121465 said...

Thanks for this.

Any way to make this a global change for many users that will be moved to multiple new databases?

Michael Bast said...

Hi, great article. If you are still having the problem (Outlook 2010 + 2013 ok, Outlook 2016 not) double check if you have a Public Folder Server with CASRole! This is not clearly mentioned in the docs from Microsoft.

Greetings

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much, in a co-existence of 2010 and 2016 I followed https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/configure-legacy-public-folders-where-user-mailboxes-are-on-exchange-2013-servers-exchange-2013-help and your article gave me the solution to hours of troubleshooting.

Anonymous said...

My name is Zola

I have a question.

What is the ProxyMailbox?

If the Exchange 2010 Database name is Database2010.edb and Public Folder name is PublicFolder2010
and the Exchange 2016 Database is Database2016.edb where is a ProxyMailbox?

How can I expand Exchange 2010 public folders from an Exchange 2016 hosted mailbox with Outlook 2016

Thanks