|
When Exchange Public Folder structures get large they get difficult to manage - and worse than this they can start to overload your infrastructure delivering increasingly unacceptable performance to users. SPACEWatch for Exchange is an ideal tool for cleaning up your Exchange Public Folders - whether you want to improve performance; reduce storage requirements; or are planning a migration. This Best Practice guide summarizes some of the ways you can do this with SPACEWatch for Exchange. It is assumed that the reader is already familiar with basic SPACEWatch for Exchange operation, and has an appropriate space database populated.
 A good place to start on your public folder cleanup is with the easiest targets - the largest public folders and largest files. You can find these very easily from the Directory Finder and File Finder respectively. Follow these steps:
Largest public folders In this example Marketing are the clear winners in the size of their public folders - double clicking on any folder will drill down to the File Finder and list the contents of the folder - whether files are attached to messages or not. You can then run off reports etc. to share these results with others.
Largest files In this example Marketing also have the largest files - note how you can see who created these files, as well as their location. This is very useful if you want to provide reports to users to help them in their own cleanup operations. In fact File Finder even has a handy "save by user" feature so you can split the results into different reports based on Owner in one quick action. Next you may want to find where most space is being consumed across your public folders - if you have lots of public folders you probably aren't interested in those that have few or no files stored in them. To focus on the hot spot areas you can use the Tree Summary. This shows the rolled up total space consumed at each level in the folder structure - but more significantly, color-codes these so you can instantly investigate the major areas.
Tree Summary (Filter at 0.2%) In this example the filter setting was 0.2% - this means trees that contains less than 0.2% of total space are not shown. That way you can quickly see the hot spots without all the noise. If you want to see less/more detail change the Filter setting and click Refresh. Double click any folder and you will see more detail in the Directory Finder. Double click a folder in the Directory Finder and you will see all the files in that folder listed - whether they are file objects or attached to messages. Alternatively you may want to identify the top noncompliant file types - wherever they are stored in the public folder structure. For example, you may have large mp3 audio files that can easily be removed. You use the Types Summary for this analysis.
Types Summary The example above shows the types summary sorted by total space - in this Exchange infrastructure it is bitmap picture files that take up most space. To see all files of one variety - e.g. audio files - you can highlight these (you can define your own sets of highlight files by the way). If you want a quick summary of your highlighted file sets, click on the Charts button and choose Highlights.
File Types by Highlight Group Once you have cleaned up the obvious hot spots you will probably want to spend more time on the detail - looking more closely at unwanted or old files - or duplication across your folders. With the Find Duplicates tool you can find duplicated files wherever they are - and also duplicated folders.
Duplicate Files One of the more interesting ways you can search for duplication is by listing folders that are similar - by which we mean folders that have duplicated files in common. Clearly folders will vary in how similar they are depending on the quantity of duplicated files they have in common. Similar folders In the example above the "Tenders" folder is very similar in contents to the "HR" folder - they have a lot of files in common.
Find old files With the File Finder you can construct quite complex queries then run them with usually almost instant results - however large your Exchange infrastructure. For example you could narrow down the "old files" list to those old files larger than 1MB - simply add the constraint ">1M" to the Size box and repeat the search. Or you might want to limit the search to just a particular part of your Public Folder infrastructure - choose the "Look in" option then browse to the tree you want to limit the search to.
Clearly SPACEWatch for Exchange 5 is an ideal tool to help you get back in control of your Public Folder infrastructure. With its highly interactive architecture you can quickly "dive in" and find out what is causing your issues; where to start first in sorting them out; and which data you can usefully share with users to help them in your objectives. If you have any further questions about cleaning up Public Folders please contact Sharpeware and we will be happy to discuss your issues further. |
Find
| SPACEWatchtm for Exchange. |
© Sharpeware Ltd 2011 | All Rights Reserved | Home | Contact | Privacy statement
Contact
•
Email
•
Telephone:
USA +1 800 706-2939
UK +44 800 680-0669
Brussels +32-27470493
