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10 Minute Guide to Microsoft Exchange 5.0

- Lesson 16 -
Working with the Favorites Folder

 

In this lesson, you learn how to use a special folder called a Favorites folder.

Understanding the Favorites Folder

As the various divisions, departments, and individuals in your organization create public folders for different uses, the list of public folders grows quite long. After a while, it takes time and effort to scroll through all the public folders to find the one you need. And often, many of the public folders are of little interest to you either because you don't have a reason to use their contents or you don't have permission to access them. But unfortunately, you still have to scroll through them.

Instead of crawling through all those public folders, you can use a special folder that stores shortcuts to the public folders you need to access regularly. This special folder is called the Favorites folder. The Favorites folder is one of the folders placed under the Public Folders container during the installation of Microsoft Exchange Client. (The other is a container named All Public Folders, below which all the public folders for your company are displayed.)


Shortcut A shortcut is a reference to (or a pointer to) another object in Microsoft Exchange Server. If you place a shortcut to a folder into your Favorites folder, the shortcut provides a link to its connected folder. The folder itself is not placed in the Favorites folder (that would make it a subfolder). But double-clicking the shortcut actually opens the folder.

Adding Folders to the Favorites Folder

After you know which public folders you need to access on a regular basis, you can add them to your Favorites folder. Just select the public folder, and then choose File, Add to Favorites or click the Add to Favorites button.

Either way, the Add to Favorites dialog box appears (see Figure 16.1). This dialog box displays the public folder's name and then provides a place where you can enter a new name for this folder that will identify it in the Favorites folder. By default, the original public folder name is used. Click the Add button to accept the default name, or enter a new name in the Favorite Folder Name text box and then click Add.

Figure 16.1 Each shortcut to a public folder should have a name that you will recognize.


Favorites by Another Name The original name of a folder is used by default when you add a shortcut for it to your Favorites folder. However, you can use any name that you would like for the shortcut, and it will still point to the chosen folder (even though they will have different names).

Adding Subfolders to Your Favorites Folder

Although a public folder may have subfolders, these subfolders are not automatically added to the Favorites folder when their parent folder is added. To display the choices for adding a folder's subfolders to the Favorites folder, open the Add to Favorites dialog box and click the Options button. The dialog box expands to show the Subfolders section, shown in Figure 16.2.

Figure 16.2 You must specify if and how subfolders should be added to the Favorites folder.

If you choose to add subfolders, you must also specify to add all subfolders or immediate subfolders only. Click the appropriate option button to indicate your preference. In addition, you can choose to automatically add any new subfolders that are created. This option is a little more complicated, and it depends on the choice you made for the first option:


Immediate Subfolder A folder that is one level below (subordinate to) any chosen folder. In other words, it is one immediate level below a folder in the folder hierarchy.

If you chose to add immediate subfolders only and you turn on the option to automatically add subfolders as they're created, Exchange automatically uses the same setting for this option (Add immediate subfolders only).

If you choose to add all subfolders and you turn on the option to automatically add subfolders as they're created, this choice is independent of the method used to originally add a folder's subfolders to the Favorites folder. Therefore, you can choose whether to automatically add only immediate subfolders as they're created or to add all subfolders as they're created.

Using the Favorites Folder

When you want to check the public folders that are important to you, open your Favorites folder, which displays the list of all the public folders you have added to your Favorites list (see Figure 16.3).

Notice that one of the folders, Project X in Figure 16.3, is listed in bold type. This means that the link between the shortcut in the Favorites folder and the original public folder has sent a message indicating there are new items in the public folder. To see the items in the public folder, highlight the item in the Folder pane. The contents appear in the Contents pane, and unread items are listed in bold type.

When you look at the listing in the Contents pane, you are looking at the items in the original public folder, just as if you had scrolled through the public folders to find the real one. The folder listing in the Favorites folder is merely a pointer. It is not really a folder, so it has no contents.

Figure 16.3 The Favorites folder lists your selected public folders.

Removing Folders from the Favorites Folder

There are going to be occasions when your access to a public folder is taken away (perhaps your participation in a project is finished) or when you find that you really have no interest in a public folder that's in your Favorites folder. You can delete a public folder from your Favorites folder by selecting it and pressing Delete. A dialog box appears, asking you to confirm the deletion. Click Yes to proceed, or click No to cancel the command to delete the folder. When you delete a public folder from your Favorites folder, you are only deleting the link (or pointer). The real public folder is not deleted.


Deleting Favorites You cannot delete the Favorites folder itself; it is a system folder.

In this lesson, you learned about the Favorites folder. In the next lesson, you'll learn about scheduling your time with Microsoft Exchange Client and Schedule+.

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