How to create & publish Organizational Forms in Exchange 2013/Office 365?

1. Free/Busy Lookups

2. Offline Address Book Distribution

3. Organization Forms Library

4. Outlook Security Settings.

Architecturally, this is to be considered as special mailbox, like all other mailboxes having a single TLH (Top Level Hierarchy), but unlike all other mailboxes, Public Folders are stored in a dedicated database whose content can be replicated between servers. With Exchange Server 2013, public folders are totally re-architecture into mailbox to take advantage of high availability and storage technologies of mailbox database, which is now called as Modern Public Folders.

Most of this information is already published in some of TechNet & MSDN blogs. Here are a few references.

Exchange 12 and Public Folders

Modern Public Folders Improvements and More

Public Folders and Exchange Online

Great articles written by Bill Long on Troubleshooting of Public Folder Replication Issues.

Troubleshooting of Public Folder Replication Issues – Part 1

Troubleshooting of Public Folder Replication Issues – Part 2

Troubleshooting of Public Folder Replication Issues – Part 3

Troubleshooting of Public Folder Replication Issues – Part 4

Great articles on Recovering Public Folders after Accidental Deletion

Part -1 Recovery Process

Part - 2 Public Folder Architecture

Great articles on Recovering Public Folder Information in Exchange 2013.

Part - 1

Part – 2

 Okay…. Lots of history on public folders. Very nice…. Let’s talk about the Organization Forms Library in Exchange 2013/Office 365

What is an Organization Forms Library & why to use?

An organization's forms library is a repository for forms (templates that help users to enter and view information) that are accessed by all users in a company. In simple terms, an organizational forms library is a special type of public folder that is listed only with system folders.

Few more questions have nicely explained by Devagnanam Jayaseelan in his MSDN blog.

Tutorial: Organization Forms Library

Custom Forms deployment where we can publish Outlook Custom Forms?

With the help of these 2 blogs, I have given detailed steps in creating, granting and publishing Organization Forms into Office 365 Modern Public Folders. This process is same in On-Premise Exchange 2013 Modern Public Folders.

Step 1:-

New-PublicFolder -Path "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\EFORMS REGISTRY" -Name "Organizational Forms Library"

Step 2:-

Organizational Forms Library

Set-PublicFolder "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\EFORMS REGISTRY\Organizational Forms Library" -EformsLocaleID en-US

NOTE: If the customer wants locale to support to his country based language, then we have created a new folder and set –EformsLocaleID. For Example for UK English, then

New-PublicFolder -Path "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\EFORMS REGISTRY" -Name "Organizational Forms Library UK"

Set-PublicFolder "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\EFORMS REGISTRY\Organizational Forms Library UK" -EformsLocaleID en-GB

Step 3:-

Once System folders (Public Folder) are created, we need to grant appropriate permissions for those users whoever want to publish those folders for Enterprise usage. To grant these permissions:

Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -identity "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\EFORMS REGISTRY” -user <Identity> -AccessRights OWNER

Add-PublicFolderClientPermission -identity "\NON_IPM_SUBTREE\EFORMS REGISTRY\Organizational Forms Library" -user <Identity> -AccessRights OWNER

Step 4:-

Finally, using Outlook 2010 able to publish the forms into the Organizational Forms Library.

Here is sample form https://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=63

Note: Before publishing the form, we need to enable “Developer” TAB in Outlook. To enable same, Outlook | File | Options | Customize the Ribbon: | Check box “Developer” TAB.

Setup

1. Download the Survey.zip file (13.6 kb), then extract the Osurvey.oft file that it contains.

2. In Outlook, choose Tools | Forms | Choose Form.

3. At the top of the Choose Form dialog, select User Templates in File System.

4. Navigate to the folder that you used in Step 1 to extract the Osurvey.oft file.

5. Click Open.

6. Publish the form to the Organization Forms library so that everyone in your organization can use it. Do NOT check the Send form definition with item box on the (Properties) page of the form.

Hope above information is very helpful.

Thanks to all other blog writers who has already published detailed information on Public Folders.