There are several ways to reduce system traffic and increase system efficiency when you replicate public folders.
One way to increase replication efficiency is to maintain commonality in replica lists when you create folders. This reduces traffic on the system because public folders are replicated more efficiently. Changes are aggregated for distribution to other servers based on commonality in the replica list.
For example, if you have a set of similar public folders that contain information on department budgets, make sure that all folders have the same replication list. If you perform the following steps in the order indicated, the subfolders inherit the replica list from the parent folder.
1. Create a top-level folder.
2. Set the replica list as appropriate.
3. Create subfolders for the top-level folders.
As the number of folders you have on your system increases, so do the time and resources needed to replicate the folder hierarchy. To avoid this, create a single folder with different views to display information.
For example, instead of creating a folder for each employee in your department, you can create a single folder and designate the name of each employee as a field in that folder. That way, you can sort on an employee's name when you want to see information about that employee.
By creating servers that each deal with a specific application, task, or function, you can increase system efficiency. For example, use one server to handle only the bulletin board system (BBS) tree and another folder to handle only Microsoft Schedule+ data. When you do so, be careful not to overcentralize. This causes every user of a particular application to access the same server. Instead, widely used data, such as Schedule + free/busy information, needs to be distributed to multiple servers.