How to sync iPhone, Android, BlackBerry with Public Folders on Exchange Server

If you setup an Exchange account in your mobile phone or tablet, you will be able to view your own Exchange mailbox but you will not be able to sync your device with any public folders on Exchange Server. It’s a common problem many smartphone users encounter every day. If you need to access your company’s Exchange databases, such as calendars or contacts, and then synchronize them with your mobile device to stay on top of everything, you will not be able to do it using Exchange Server native capabilities. Unfortunately, the most popular handhelds such as iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry or Android cannot be synchronized with public folders of Exchange Server unless you resort to doing a little trick.

You can use a third party solution from CodeTwo. It’s called CodeTwo Exchange Sync and it lets you automatically synchronize data between your personal Exchange mailbox and public folders on Exchange Server. Once your data is finally located in your mailbox, you can easily synchronize it with your smartphone using its native software. By doing so, you will always have the same amount of the most up-to-date data in your personal mailbox and in your mobile device as well:

CodeTwo Exchange Sync can be installed either directly on server or on any PC in your Exchange environment. Its simple and intuitive user’s interface will let you quickly configure synchronization tasks, which will be performed by the program automatically and in real time.

All your synchronization tasks are located on the left hand side in the program’s pane:

CodeTwo Exchange Sync has various synchronization options. You can sync your folders using the following methods:

• one-to-one – one way synchronization
• one-to-many – one way synchronization
• many-to-one – one way synchronization
• folder ring – two way synchronization

One-to-one synchronization will let you e.g. automatically update all shared company contacts to your private contacts folder. However, all changes in your personal contacts folder or in your mobile device will not be propagated to the shared company contacts folder:

If you select a folder ring method, you can sync two (or more folders) in a two way mode. It means that any changes in any folder are propagated to all folders included in the synchronization task. In other words, if you create a folder ring synchronization task for shared company contacts, your personal contacts folder and your friends’ contact folders, any changes made on your folders and mobile devices will be propagated to every folder. All in all, each folder will be a mirror of every other folder in this synchronization task:

CodeTwo Exchange Sync is not only designed to let you share data between mobile devices and Exchange Server. It’s ability to synchronize Exchange Server folders with private mailboxes in any mail client connected to Exchange gives you a number of collaboration possibilities. You can e.g. create a common company’s calendar containing appointments entered by any group of employees. What is more, filtering and modifying tools in the program are able to mark each synchronized item on the fly to make it unique and recognizable in the group of other items (e.g. by adding the Source Folder Name or Source Mailbox Name to the subject):

Written by Adam the 32-bit Aardvark

Updated: July 10, 2020

Posted: June 27, 2013