Public Folders Not Replicating

Recently after setting up a second Exchange 2010 server I had an issue where Public Folder replicas were not replicating. When running the following cmdlet it showed the replicas as being configured but they never showed up on the second server.

Get-PublicFolder -recurse | fl Name,Replicas

Name     : IPM_SUBTREE

Replicas : {}

Name     : Accounting Calendar1

Replicas : {PFDB02, PFDB01}

Name     : IT Calendar1

Replicas : {PFDB02, PFDB01}

I didn’t get any errors when configuring the replicas. I even set the Diagnostic Logging Level on certain services under MSExchangeIS\9001 Public to Expert but still nothing.

After a few days of dead ends on the Internet I was reminded about ExFolders. So I downloaded it & tried to run it but got an error that says, “An error occurred while trying to establish a connection to the Exchange server. Exception: The Active Directory user wasn’t found.” Finally an error I can search for. I quickly came across this site.

I opened ADSIEdit & connected to the Configuration partition. I deleted the empty CN=Servers container from the old administrative group in CN=Configuration,CN=Services,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=OrgName,CN=Administrative Group,CN=OldAdminGroupName . I ran ExFolders again & did not get an error. Moments later the replicas were showing up on the second server. Well that was easy enough.

Note – Be very careful when using ADSIEdit. Also, DO NOT delete the container for the old Administrative group. It will still be there if you did a transition from a previous version of Exchange.

Ref – http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2010/05/05/3409916.aspx