Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Problems Deleting a 2007 Public Folder Database

It's finally time to decommission our Exchange 2007 environment, and after several days of messing around with public folder replicas, I finally got them all moved off and was ready to delete the public folder database. Denied!

The error was something like "object is read only because it was created by a newer version of Exchange." Balls.

Hopped on an Exchange 2010 server, opened an EMS console and ran Get-PublicFolderDatabase. Hmm. Just shows me the 2010 databases. There must be a way.

"Help Get-PublicFolderDatabase" revealed a previously unknown (to me) switch named "IncludePreExchange2010". A-HA!

The solution was to select the 2007 database, and then pipe the object to Remove-PublicFolderDatabase.

Get-PublicFolderDatabase 'DBNAME' -IncludePreExchange2010 | Remove-PublicFolderDatabase

Worked like a charm. All that's left to do is uninstall Exchange 2007 and it'll finally be history.