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October 16, 2004
Storing Knowledge in Public Folders
We all know that there's an amazing amount of knowledge contained in simple email messages. As I've mentioned in several presentations, I often use Microsoft Exchange public folders to easily make such emails available to groups of users.
Public folders look just like your own email folders, but they can be shared with other individuals or groups. You can set security to limit access, or make them available to everyone on the network.
So how would you use public folders? If you have an internal email mailing list for the firm's reference librarians, there's likely valuable information being passed back and forth, so you might want to store all such emails for everyone's viewing pleasure. To do that you can easily set up a rule in Outlook to automatically move all messages sent to the list into their own public folder. Or perhaps you'd like to store selected emails on a topic in their own public folder by moving individual emails from your inbox to the folder. By making this information public, you may be able to avoid individuals having to store these items in their own, private folders. And you have searchable, though primitive, knowledgebase.
But navigating to public folders can be tedious, depending upon the number of levels in your hierarchy. That's why my favorite way to share folders is to link to them from the Intranet using Outlook Linker, a handy utility that creates a link or URL to public folders or to specific emails in those folders.
I'll admit to being momentarily panicked a couple of months ago when my computer was migrated to XP and Outlook 2003. Suddenly the public folders were no where to be found. After several days, and a few calls to the help desk, we figured out that in the new interface you need to go to the "folder list" view to find public folders. Hmm, isn't that intuitive. :-)
Another tip: I quickly learned that all of my links to public folders no longer worked on XP. Turns out the "#" sign in the name of the folder caused the link to malfunction. The # sign has been removed from the name, and all is well. Don't ask me why # was fine in Windows 2000, but unusable in XP. Just another Microsoft mystery.
It may be best not to get too attached to public folders. Microsoft seems less than enthusiastic about them of late, and seems to be suggesting that Sharepoint, their portal product, would be a better method of making information available to the enterprise, though they swear that public folders aren't going away in the near future.
For more information on where public folders are headed, see "Are Public Folders Dead?"
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