Wednesday, January 30, 2008

PFDAVADMIN, Exchange 2007, and the v1.1 .NET Framework

If you have never used PFDAVADMIN to manage public folders, it is a pretty neat utility. It helps you do a lot of things "in bulk" that you would not easily be able to do otherwise. At least certainly not quickly. And, it works with Exchange 2000/2003/2007!

However, on two different Exchange 2007 servers, I have received messages similar to this:

'Could not expand https://localhost/exadmin/admin/mydomain.com/public%20folders/ : name cannot begin with the '0' character, hexadecimal value 0x30. Line 1, position 386'

I figured something was wrong with my public folder configuration, but never did investigate it too closely. Thanks to a discussion I read recently, one of the gurus at Microsoft shed some light on this. This message occurs if you do not have the Microsoft .NET Framework v1.1 installed on the server. (Exchange 2007 uses the v2.0 Framework).

Microsoft recommends using the PFDAVADMIN utility from a workstation, not from the console of the Exchange server, though. If you get this message, do NOT install the v1.1 Framework on an existing Exchange 2007 server. You run the risk of resetting some of the v2.0 Framework settings and, thus, breaking Exchange Server 2007! If you want to run PFDAVADMIN from the console of an Exchange 2007 server, you need to install the v1.1 .NET Framework prior to building Exchange. Thus, the "workstation" option is much more desirable.

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14 Comments:

At 2:01 AM, Blogger Amit Tank said...

This helps a lot to Exchange community…!!

Thanks Jim… :)

 
At 12:34 PM, Blogger Hazard said...

Thanks very much. This saved me a huge headache!

 
At 11:04 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

I have Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and 1.1 hotfix (KB928366) but could not get PFDAVAdmin to work. I have other .NET Framework installed as well (2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2, 3.5 SP1). The error message I get is "PFDAVAdmin could not be initialized. Exception: Request for the permission of type System.Security.Permissions.RegistryPermission, mscorlib, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 failed. (more regarding Stack trace:)

Any suggestions????

 
At 1:49 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks for your article. Solved my prob right away...thank you !

 
At 8:30 AM, Blogger mvcampos said...

Thanks for your post! Solution was as easy as use my own computer instead of the server

 
At 4:29 AM, Blogger Gaw said...

Worked, thanks.

 
At 2:12 PM, Blogger Corbett said...

Thomas, be sure to run the file from a local C drive and not from a UNC path. It gave me that error and I was pulling my hair out until I decided to try and copy it to C. No problem after that!

 
At 5:49 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

You might have better luck with ExFolder for Exchange 2010 on this. I spent 2hrs trying to PFADAMIN to work with 2003/2007 then downloaded ExFolder and it worked flawlessly.

 
At 2:52 AM, Blogger wheezzl said...

Thanks so much for this! helped me out in a desparate situation!!

 
At 4:07 AM, Blogger David said...

We had this issue and had later .NET Framework versions installed. Nonetheless, we downloaded and installed .NET Framework 1.1 and PFDAVADMIN worked like a champ. Thanks!

 
At 4:09 AM, Blogger David said...

We had later versions of .NET Framework installed but not version 1.1. We downloaded and installed version 1.1 (even though later versions were installed) and PFDAVADMIN worked like a champ. We had to use Windows XP it didn't seem to like Windows 7 at all.

 
At 5:37 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Thank You, Thank You. This resolved the same issue I was experiencing running that tool on my windows 7. After downloading and installing .net 1.1 worked like a charm.

 
At 6:55 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks for this! Helped me out greatly!

 
At 9:26 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Thank you Microsoft ... Good find! Thanks!!

 

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