Jason explores the difficulty in controlling “total number of unread items” vs. “total number of items” counter settings in hosted exchange public folders.
One of our newest hosted exchange customers has a focus on workflow tracking using task folders at the organizational public folder level. They came up with a problem that I could not resolve. The customer wanted to be able to control the folder properties setting which controls which item count is visible in Outlook. From the customer’s perspective the options are visible, but disabled. Adding to the problem the folders the customer created had randomly defaulted to one setting or the other.
My own efforts to resolve this did result in some enlightenment. For an Exchange user to see the counters at all, the folder must be in the “Favorites” subfolder one level below the root “Public Folders”. But the problem of controlling the behavior on a folder by folder basis remained.
Figure 1 is a screen shot within the hosted exchange Outlook client which illustrates both problems - random behavior, and disabled radio button settings.
After a week or so of no answers on an ASP.NET forum post I burned one of our free annual Microsoft technical support issues. My support engineer was very helpful in this instance and discovered the cause, the reasoning for the behavior, and a good work around that I am sure will be helpful to the greater HMC service provider community.
Cause
The cause of the radio buttons controlling this behavior was determined to be by design of the Hosted Exchange solution team. It was a performance issue to leave each of these settings accessible by the user in the HMC solution environment. The cause for each folder to randomly take one setting or the other was not determined.
The behavior of each folder is controlled by server side MAPI property “0x36DA0102” which can be assigned to each folder.
Workaround
In short the work around is to use MAPI Editor, a free download from Microsoft, to manually set the behavior on each folder to the desired setting. This must only be done once for each organizational public folder and is not user specific, but this was acceptable in our case, and worked well.
Step by Step Workaround
1. Download MAPI Editor onto an Outlook box from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=55fdffd7-1878-4637-9808-1e21abb3ae37&DisplayLang=en
2. You will need to be able to logon to a mailbox for a user that has Owner permissions to the public folder. By default in HMC, the org’s Admins are only given Publishing Editor permissions, which is not sufficient. You will need to configure an Outlook profile to logon to this Owner mailbox.
3. Make sure Outlook is closed and run MFCMapi.exe from the download. Click OK to dismiss the Help screen.
4. On the Session menu, choose Logon and Display Store Table. You will be prompted to choose a profile, choose the profile you configured to connect to the public folder’s Owner’s mailbox.
5. Enter credentials if prompted. Double-click Public Folders to open the Public Folder tree.
6. Expand Public Root and then expand IPM_SUBTREE. Continue to expand the tree to find the public folder you want to modify.
7. Select the public folder to modify. In the right-hand pane a list of properties will appear.
8. Look for a property with the Property Name 0x36DA0102.
a. If it is not present, then the public folder should be currently displaying the count of unread items.
b. If it is present, then double-click it to check the value. It will be a series of digits, like 010402000000. The important digit is the 6th digit. If it is 1, then the public folder will display the count of unread items. If it is 2, then it will display the total number of items.
9. To change the behavior:
a. If the property is not present, go to the Property Pane menu and choose Modify ‘Extra’ Properties. Click Add and enter 0x36da0102 for the Property Tag, then click OK. A new item will appear in the list of properties with the Property Name 0x36DA0102. Double-click this to edit it and enter 010401000000 to display count of unread, or enter 010402000000 to display total number of items.
b. If the property is present, then double-click it to edit it. Modify the 6th digit to be 1 for count of unread, or 2 for total number of items.
10. Close all MFCMapi windows.