Propagate Permissions in Exchange Public Folders

Setting public folder permissions in Exchange is counter-intuitive. Anyway, this is how:

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid43_gci1172543,00.html

However, I think the Add User option in the Manage Public Folder Settings Wizard is more useful because we usually simply add users instead of replace them.

Here is the original text:

In most Microsoft products, when you set permissions on a folder, child objects inherit the permissions you set on the parent object. Exchange Server public folders don't work that way though.

If you look at the permissions assigned to the Forms and Policies folders, you will see that they still have default permissions -- even though we modified permissions on the parent folder. If we were to create a new subfolder beneath the Everyone folder, it would inherit the new permissions we applied to the Everyone folder -- but existing folders do not automatically inherit permission changes to parent folders.

In our sample Exchange Server public folder structure, there are only two subfolders beneath the Everyone folder. So it isn't a big deal to manually change their permissions to match the parent public folder permissions.

But what if there were two thousand subfolders? You wouldn't want to have to manually change the permissions on all of them. Fortunately, there is a way to force the permissions of a parent public folder to propagate to child public folders.

1. To force subfolders to inherit a parent public folder's permissions, right click on the parent public folder and select the All Tasks -> Manage Settings to launch the Manage Public Folder Settings Wizard. (Prior to Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, there was a Propagate Settings command accessible from the All Tasks menu, but Microsoft replaced it with the Manage Settings command to avoid confusion.)

2. Click Next to bypass the wizard's Welcome screen.

3. Select the Overwrite Settings option and click Next.

4. You will now see a screen that asks you which settings you want to overwrite. Choose the Folder Rights option and click Next, followed by Finish.

The permissions on the Exchange Server public folder subfolders will now be replaced.