Exchange Server 2003 provides five new Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) providers and 15 new WMI classes. As I showed you in "Managing Exchange 2003 with WMI, Part 1," January 2004, http://www.winnetmag.com/microsoftexchangeoutlook, InstantDoc ID 40755, these new providers and classes let you easily manage Exchange servers, logons, and mailboxes. The new providers and classes also let you easily manage Exchange public folders—a welcomed addition. All earlier versions of Exchange lack easy-to-use programmable capabilities for managing public folders. Although Collaboration Data Objects for Exchange Management (CDOEXM) and the Exchange OLEDB provider (through ADO) offer some public folder management capabilities, most Exchange administrators and programmers find CDOEXM and the Exchange OLEDB provider difficult to use.
The two WMI classes related to public folder management are Exchange_FolderTree and Exchange_PublicFolder. The WMI provider ExchangeFolderTreeProvider supports the Exchange_FolderTree class, which represents the public folder hierarchies available on the Exchange 2003 server to which you're connected. This class exposes a set of read-only properties and no methods. Therefore, this class only retrieves information about public folder hierarchies. . . .
