PFDAVADMIN errors and solutions

Due to limited functionality in Exchange 2007 to manage public folders, many Exchange administrators use PFDAVADMIN to manage their public folders. In my opinion, setting permissions is the most important enrichment of PFDAVADMIN. I still can’t believe Microsoft did not implement it in their Exchange Management Console (EMC). Nevertheless, we may be glad that they DID make a GUI for creating and deleting Public Folders. 🙂

A lot of people (I’m one of them) have some trouble running PFDAVADMIN. I had two problems:

1) When I tried to connect to the Public Folder, I got the following error:
‘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′

Solution: It seems like .NET Framework 1.1 is a requirement for PFDAVADMIN to run. Although I had installed .NET Framework, I had to do a reinstall of .NET Framework. After the reinstall, the error didn’t show up.
NOTE: Jim McBee reports on his blog that installing .NET Framework on your Exchange server would be a bad idea because you might adjust .NET Framework 2.0 settings. Therefore he highly recommends everyone to use a desktop for PFDAVADMIN.

2) When I try to connect to the Public Folders on one particular desktop, I got the error:
An error occurred while trying to establish a connection to the Exchange server. Exception: Failed to connect using URL http://% with error: The remote server returned an error (407) Proxy Authentication Required

Solution: Now, I’m totally sure my Proxy settings were fine. To solve this problem, I chose to fill in the IP-address of the Exchange server in PFDAVADMIN. And it worked. So, instead of supplying the DNS names of the Exchange server and Global Catalog server, I filled in the IP-addresses and everything worked fine.

The IT world is a strange world. Sometimes.