Exch 2013 Public Folder Connectivity Issues

Question

We've had a ticket open with support for a while but we're not making much progress and we are currently fighting two related issues.

1. Users have intermittent connections issues with public folders
2. Users can't create or modify public folders

Background
Small user base - less than 200 concurrent users
Public Folder count is high for the user base - 10k public folders (parents and children)

The system was upgraded from 2010 to 2013. Initially just a single server to a single server. After upgrade to modern public folders, users were having connection issues, both on loading hierarchy, but also connecting to content folders. They would have to restart outlook a few times to attempt to reconnect to the public folders until eventually successful.

Working with Microsoft we added a 2nd server, then split up the Public Folders across 5 databases.
We detected latency at the disk level so we upgraded the hardware from HDD to SSD

This did NOT fix the issue - it remains constant today.

AFTER we split out the public folders we encountered an additional issue
This did appear to reduce the number of connectivity issues but not eliminate them (nor reduce it enough to not be an issue). Not only were we fighting the connectivity issues, but now users can not create or modify folders directly. It reports they do not have permissions however, we have validated this (with MSFT support we have validated permissions and configurations).

What we have discovered -

• No issues with macOS and Outlook client
• OWA is responsive when PF's are set to Favorites
• Traces appear to show a Create and Delete request being made when attempting to create a folder from Outlook client.
• We've tried RPC/HTTP and MAPI/HTTP - same results

The issues seem to revolve around the Outlook mail client on windows specifically. However, we (with MSFT) are so far unable to pinpoint the issue. We've used new clients on new machines with no policies across different networks, internal and external, and can replicate this issue consistently - however, we've built test setups, that mimic the deployment and can not replicate there.

Answer 1

@Jesus J. Shelby
Hi,
Thanks for providing the defailed information.

however, we've built test setups, that mimic the deployment and can not replicate there.
Do you mean that you setup a brand new exchange 2013 server,created several public folders(not up to 10k) on it for test,while the problem can't be reproduced.

Have you read this KB which describes the permission issue?

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Answer 2

We are validating now - but possibly. There were a few things here.

• The support team believes there was a Bug in Outlook around folder creation items. They filed one with the product team as this impacted all version of Outlook on Windows.
• A workaround for RPC/HTTP connections was to elevate the service account to system (from Network)
• We were able to get MAPI/HTTP connections working with Public Folders which also seem to be alleviating the cause for users. We tried this previously with different results, so it's unclear if previous changes made while working on this issue with Microsoft impacted the behavior of MAPI/HTTP - but as of now this is working.