Exchange public folders are a great enhancement of co-operation and work efficiency in companies that run Exchange Server. Thanks to them you can view common calendars, read company mail and work with shared company contacts. All these things work great when you’re on Microsoft Outlook with a full access to your Exchange account, but there are some limitations though. For instance, if your workflow requires a bit of automation, e.g. synchronizing data between Exchange folders without users’ interference, or you need to use a less advanced mail client, e.g. an Active Sync smartphone, you’re in a pickle.
Let us show you how to easily apply automatic folder synchronization tasks on Microsoft Exchange Server with CodeTwo Exchange Sync. This easy-to-use, but yet powerful application, will let you synchronize data between various types of Exchange folders, in real time and in many different ways.
Things shown in this article will help you:
Synchronize public folders with users’ private Exchange folders.
Synchronize Exchange public folders with Android, iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices.
Update many private Exchange calendars from one place.
CodeTwo Public Folders is a versatile collaboration tool for Microsoft Outlook users that enables sharing all Outlook items across local network and between multiple PCs. It allows companies of small and mid sector to save a lot of money on IT services, since no server deployment and maintenance is required in this case. For less than $500, an average office can get a professional collaboration system that streamlines teamwork in Microsoft Outlook and makes every employee work faster and more efficient. See the video below to get a grip of how it works:
In this article we will cover only a small selection of possibilities this program gives you and we will explain how to improve project management and work efficiency while working on tasks in Microsoft Outlook.
Step 1: Arrange the folders in Outlook
Let’s start with building the right Outlook folder tree structure.
As you can see in the picture above CodeTwo Public Folders lets you create public folders in the exact same way as it is done with private items. Every folder appearing in the C2Public Folders section is by default visible to all users in the network. If the access rights are not changed by the administrator, users can read, modify and delete public folders whenever they want. What’s more all changes are synchronized with other machines in real time.
Step 2: Assign smaller tasks to team members
In this example we have split the whole office into two teams: Team Green and Team Red. Every team has its tasks grouped in projects and assigned to team members. The advantage of this method is that every project can be divided into smaller stages (tasks). This organizes teamwork in a better way and results in good job performance and quality.
Step 3: Keep a diary of your work
Thanks to CodeTwo Public Folders team members and managers can monitor the progress of the given project, since all changes are replicated to other machines in real time. Team members only need to update the status of a given assignment and keep a log of everything what’s completed within the task (as shown below). Note that all data is synchronized together with the task, including documents and other files attached by users.
Step 4 (optional) Set access rights for public folders in Outlook
This collaboration model can also be enriched with access rights set up allowing team leaders to decide who can view, edit or delete Outlook items synchronized with CodeTwo Public Folders. These settings are easily accessible from the machine equipped with the Syncing Master module – a sort of brain in every CodeTwo Public Folders network. Learn more about the Administration Panel of CodeTwo Public Folders
Try out for free
If you want to test these settings live, feel free to evaluate the program at no cost. The 30-day fully functional trial version of CodeTwo Public Folders is available at www.codetwo.com.
Where’s Santa? Did you see him? Will he bring us something fancy this year? Here at CodeTwo we could hardly wait to see this old man, but eventually, only Szymon got his present this year. We suspect that he made a special deal with Rovaniemi or cheated on us by sending some fake information about our misbehavior in his letters to Santa Claus. Not that we are jealous, of course…
Anyway… We wish you a wonderful holiday time and may Santa bring you at least as cool gifts as the one you can see in the video below!
And if your heli doesn’t arrive, don’t worry. Santa might have had some trouble on the road, but we’re sure he’s on his way :)
How often does it happen to you… You scroll down the Outlook folder tree, accidentally grab one of its items and then unintentionally drop onto a different. Sounds familiar? Or maybe you have recently deleted a whole Outlook folder instead of one item only? These situations keep happening to everyone, no matter if you are a Outlook newbie or an experienced user. Outlook doesn’t warn about such situations natively. Luckily, here comes CodeTwo Move & Delete Watchdog, the newest free Outlook addin by CodeTwo.
CodeTwo Move & Delete Watchdog warns about unintentional moving or deleting folders in Microsoft Outlook. It is typical install-and-forget software. Once it is installed on a PC equipped with Outlook, it fully integrates with your mail client and starts working straight away. Whenever you move a folder in Outlook’s navigation pane or are about to delete something from the Outlook folder tree, a popup dialog appears asking for your confirmation. Although the application requires absolutely no configuration to work properly, you can decide if you wish to be notified when you move a folder, delete it, or in both of these cases.
Watch this video to see how it works:
So… If you’re tired of looking for folders that accidentally changed their locations in Outlook or want to be sure you don’t loose important Outlook data by accident, better install CodeTwo Move & Delete Watchdog on your PC right now. It’s free, contains no adds and – like all our apps – will save you heaps of time and nerves with working with your mail client.
We have just released an update to our free Outlook synchronization tool, CodeTwo FolderSync Addin. The newest version of the program has an improved IMAP folder syncing mechanism – it is now possible to synchronize Outlook standard Mail folders with IMAP folders. Feel free to download and use this tool at no cost.
What is CodeTwo FolderSync Addin?
CodeTwo FolderSync Addin is a simple and easy-to-use free Outlook extension that enables the synchronization of Outlook folders within a single machine. Users can choose one or many pairs of folders they wish to be synchronized in Outlook. The syncing process is initialized by the user, by clicking on a button placed in the Outlook main ribbon.
CodeTwo FolderSync Addin is especially useful in synchronizing Public Folders, either Exchange-based or the ones shared using CodeTwo Public Folders, with mobile devices and smartphones. The program replicates public data to private Outlook elements (and vice versa) allowing users to access shared data from handhelds, which usually are able to synchronize only default mailbox elements.
If your company uses a single POP3 email account for receiving general inquiries from customers and business partners, you’d probably like to know how to make it accessible for a larger group of employees via Microsoft Outlook. In this short tutorial I will show you how to create a shared company Inbox in Outlook without investing huge sums of money in servers and costly server-dedicated software. All you need to achieve this goal is the free trial version of CodeTwo Public Folders installed on all machines in your office.
To cut a long story short, CodeTwo Public Folders lets you create public folders in the Outlook folder tree that can be easily accessed by your office-mates from other PCs. It also allows sharing private Outlook folders with others and set detailed access rights for all shared items. Today we will cover only a small selection of use cases that this powerful collaboration tool has – a shared company inbox.
To see how to install CodeTwo Public Folders, watch this short video:
If you already have CodeTwo Public Folders installed on all machines in your network, we can move on to configuring the shared inbox.
Step 1
Choose one workstation in the office that will be responsible for receiving mail from your general email address (e.g. info@company.com) and configure an Outlook account on it that will use the general email address.
If you need any help with configuring a POP3 account in Outlook, you can use a free tool by CodeTwo, CodeTwo Outlook AutoConfig that will do it for you automatically.
Step 2
Create a public mail folder in the C2PublicFolders folder tree that will receive data from your general email address and act as a common Inbox.
In the Administration Panel of CodeTwo Public Folders set access rights for the common Inbox according to your needs. The Administration Panel is located on the machine equipped with the Syncing Master. You will find it in the Windows Start Menu.
Ok, that’s it. Now all messages sent to your company’s general email address can be read and processed by all employees in the network, even though they use their individual email accounts in Outlook. All messages received by the PC configured in Step 1 will be synchronized in real time and visible in the common Inbox on all other machines. You can also choose to extend this feature by installing CodeTwo CatMan, the free Outlook category manager that will allow your workmates to assign statuses for messages, e.g. pending, processed etc. For more details watch the CodeTwo CatMan video:
The example described in this article is only one of many team work scenarios that can be applied using CodeTwo Public Folders. For more examples of application see the CodeTwo Public Folders product page.
CodeTwo team has just returned from Microsoft Technology Summit 2011, the biggest and the most popular Microsoft tech event in Poland. Although it was the first time we took part in such event as an official partner and we didn’t know what to expect, we came back to CodeTwo HQ with very positive moods and the whole event made a good impression on us. Here’s how MTS 2011 looked like from our perspective.
As it often happens with new projects, our preparations didn’t go as smoothly as we had originally expected. It took almost two months to put everything together, but all in all we managed to organize everything right on time. On October 18th, at 7 a.m. our exhibition stand was ready to receive 3000 IT specialists from all over the country.
Every person visiting us on MTS 2011 had a chance to hear about our programs from CodeTwo specialists and test drive them live in a specially prepared test environment. Mostly, we have presented our two flagship products – CodeTwo Exchange Rules Pro and CodeTwo Public Folders, but visitors very often asked us about the rest of CodeTwo products, including free tools as well.
As we predicted, the most popular spot at our stand was the place where visitors filled out an electronic survey and registered themselves in the CodeTwo lottery.
At the end of the conference, the competition gathered over 400 participants, from which we have drawn out one lucky person that won the main prize – Windows Phone 7 smartphone. 9 other people received CodeTwo T-shirts and flash drives. Congratulations! :)
Microsoft Technology Summit 2011 was also a great opportunity to hear from you about how to improve our software and in which direction of development to choose. We gathered an interesting list of feature requests that will now be deeply analyzed. Who knows, maybe some of these ideas will be implemented in our programs very soon. Thank you for that!
To sum up, Microsoft Technology Summit 2011 turned out to be a very positive experience for us. As a company selling its software mostly in the Internet, we always value the opportunities, when we get to meet our clients and talk to them in person. What’s really elevating for us, most of the people we met in Warsaw were very positive about our software and things we create here at CodeTwo. It definitely motivates us to work even harder and to keep developing software, which not only meets your expectations but goes far beyond them.
So… Where to go next? TechEd Europe? Why not. Maybe we will meet you there next year!
We have just released an update to CodeTwo Exchange Sync. The new version 2.2.4 includes several minor bug fixes and changes you have requested recently. We recommend all users to download the new installer and update their current installations.
Here is the full list of changes in version 2.2.4:
C2ExchangeSyncService-{GUID} profile created for the synchronization service is not removed during reinstallation/update. Its removal in earlier versions caused an issue starting the service if Exchange Sync worked in MAPI profile mode.
MAPI Profile mode detection improved. In earlier version the mode was detected only until the ‘Outlook conflict warning’ was closed ‘Do not show again’.
Support for Windows 2000.
Dynamic loading of MAPI libraries changed.
The update is free of charge for all current license owners. To update your software, download the newest installer and install it on top of the existing installation. The previous version will be automatically patched and all your settings will be kept.
One of our flagship products – CodeTwo Public Folders, has been enhanced with new features and its updated version is ready to be downloaded from our website. Above all, the program’s Syncing Master is now equipped with a brand new Administration panel, which gives a better control of shared folders database and allows the administrator to easily access the synchronization settings.
Here’s the full list of things added to CodeTwo Public Folders in version 4.7:
The software has a completely new UI of the Administration panel.
The administrator can now easily retrieve folders that were accidentally removed by users.
The program can now create and manage database backup copies.
The software allows users to easily transfer their databases from one machine to another.
The program is now able to synchronize folder views and non-standard custom forms.
The user can now control the status of the C2PublicFolders system service from the Administration panel. One can also define the database location, change the log files folder path or modify the listening ports used by the software.
The user can now check the following licensing information from the Administration panel:
- license type (trial, temporary key, full license),
- license key,
- list of currently licensed users,
- number of available licenses.
The server module can now synchronize any type of user-defined data, for example other programs’ settings.
There is now only one setup wizard for x64 and x86 versions. The software automatically chooses which version to install.
The update is free of charge for all license owners. To successfully update your software, both the Syncing Master and all Outlook Add-ins need to be updated. Note that there’s currently only one installer for both 32- and 64-bit machines. It automatically detects which version of Outlook you are running and installs the correct one.
We are happy to announce that CodeTwo has joined the group of official Partners of Microsoft Technology Summit 2011, which this year takes place in Warsaw between 18th and 19th October. This two-day event gathers specialists and managers from the entire IT industry, who use Microsoft technologies in everyday work. The conference gives them a glance at the newest IT trends and enables to share experiences between IT professionals.
As a MTS 2011 Partner, CodeTwo will be present at the spot throughout the whole summit. We hope to meet some of you at our exhibition where everyone will be able to share with us their thoughts and experiences regarding our software. For those of you, who haven’t had a chance to work with our software yet, we have prepared a special test-stand where one will be able to test our software and see it in a real action.
So… If you happen to visit Warsaw between the 18th and 19th October 2011, don’t forget to pop in to Microsoft Technology Summit. We hope to meet you there!
Microsoft Certified Partner logo indicates that CodeTwo has a significant level of technical expertise in providing reliable solutions based on Microsoft technologies. Our company has achieved a Microsoft Competency in ISV/Software Solutions designed for partners developing software that is best-in-class and among the most innovative on the market.
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We have just released an update to our free Outlook synchronization tool, 
If you need any help with configuring a POP3 account in Outlook, you can use a free tool by CodeTwo, 
We have just released an update to 
