How to implement Public Folders in Google Apps
- Tuesday, August 4, 2009, 23:49
- Google Apps
- 4 comments
If you want to implement Public Folders in Google Apps – there is no direct one to one functionality in Google Apps which can be mapped to Exchange functionality of public folders. Public folders allows a group of people to access the same set of emails and documents. How that does not mean you can not achieve the same results in Google Apps as there are different ways to achieve the same results in Google Apps.
We can work around this issue in a number of ways, depending on the your specefic needs.
Sharing emails
(1) One of the method for sharing email is to create a mailbox for each ‘public folder’. If you users will continue to use Outlook you can create an additional IMAP account in their profile to point to the ‘shared mailbox’. This way works great if you want all users to have full access to the mailbox.
(2) An alternative to IMAP is to connect to the ‘shared mailbox’ with POP using the ‘recent:’ preface to the username. Setting up a shared mailbox this way will allow for all users to download the mail from the mailbox but not to edit/delete the mail items in the shared mailbox.
(3) If your users will be using the web interface you can ‘get mail from other accounts’ and with the use of filters you can have one filter per ‘shared folder’ to keep everyone’s mailbox consistant.
Sharing Calendars
(4) If you are looking for sharing the calendar you can create a shared calendar and have everyone add it to their account.
(5) You can create a Google site and embed your calendar in Google sites. This can also be used for sharing documents as indicated.
Sharing Documents
(7) If you are looking to share documents then you must have thought of Google Docs. However in Google Docs the storage of individual docs is handled differently due to the fact that shared documents do not retain the ‘folder’ from the creator, Docs is not the preferred place to store shared documents where organization is a requirement. Considering this we can setup File Cabinet pages in Google Sites so the documents can be sorted and viewed by everyone. Documents can also be embedded directly in the Google Sites pages.
If you have come across a better way to achieve the same you can share by writing in the comments below.
About the Author
Siddartha has written 173 stories on this site.
Siddartha is a senior staff writer for TecNerd.com. Siddartha is India based consultant helping organization and people across the world adopt new technologies for day to day business use. Siddartha loves to read fiction and writes regularly as a guest writer on blogs and websites.
4 Comments on “How to implement Public Folders in Google Apps”
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Very well written article. Thanks! I wish I has seen this earlier..
We had got stuck completely while setting up Google Apps for our company. specially when it came to migrating the mails and attachments in the folders and subfolders of our Exchange public folder.
We then tried the services of this company : searceapps.com as it sounded pretty economical at that time. I think we made a good decision as they sorted it out for us.
they had a professional team and my mail folders were soon migrated there on Google Apps.
I’m not sure I understand point 4 about a public calendar. What I have done is create a new user with the name “shared calendar” – sharedcalendar@domain.com. I logged in as that user on gmail webmail and then edited its calendar sharing properties. I added each user in our organization and gave each user the ability manage all appointments. It’s not perfect or easy to manage per se as new employees come on – but I haven’t found a better alternative. Luckily – for the two clients I have set this up for, they are both nonprofits on the education edition so it’s free. If I was on premier, I would be annoyed as this option would cost an extra as its an extra mailbox.
Nice suggestions. I found InSync and Harmon.ie were good solutions for the file sharing. Best thing is that they you can integrate Google Docs right into the OS and Outlook with these. I put together a little post with some of the solutions and workarounds I for mirroring public folders in Google Apps, maybe it will help someone else in the future: http://blog.affirmix.com/2011/02/08/how-to-enable-outlook-public-folders-in-google-apps/
Re point 7 – if you share the top level folder, rather than the documents, then you do get the folder structure shared with everyone so organization does work