Exchange Cascaded Folder Permission

Twan van Beers
19 September, 2014

If you have ever done delegation in Lotus Notes and were then migrated to Outlook you would have noticed one big difference… cascaded permissions!!! We have asked Microsoft why Outlook permissions behave so differently to NTLM permissions but we haven’t had an answer. At the recent MEC a number of people were asking the same question and Microsoft took a poll from those in the session and almost everyeone wanted Outlook folder permissions to be more like file permissions, in particular to support inheritance.

However, in today’s Outlook and Exchange versions inheritance of folder permissions is not something that is provided… so as an Exchange admin what can we do about this… The simplest approach really is PowerShell! We’ve used the attached script many times to set folder permissions on a given folder plus all its subfolders.

When you run the script it will ask for:

The Mailbox whose folders you want to grant permission on
The parent root folder that you want to grant permissions on (including all its subfolders)
The recipient that you want to have the permissions
A Y/N flag as to whether you also want SendOnBehalf rights affected
A choice for the right to be granted, or for all rights to be removed

*** As always the script is provided on an as is basis, please test it before you use it in a production environment. ***

CascadeFolderPermissions.ps1

Twan van Beers

Twan is a senior consultant with over 30 years of experience. He has a wide range of skills including Messaging, Active Directory, SQL, Networking and Firewalls. Twan loves to write scripts and get deep and dirty into debugging code, in order to understand and resolve the most complex of problems.