PFDAVADMIN – “Could Not Expand” Error

Description
“Use the Exchange Server Public Folder Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV)-based Administration tool (PFDAVAdmin) to perform various management tasks related to public folders and mailboxes. The tool checks the permissions status of each public and mailbox folder and corrects any problems found. The ability to bulk export/import the permissions and replica lists make this tool invaluable in achieving greater productivity in managing public folders. The program can also report content information of each public folder and mailbox folder such as the number of items in each folder, size of folder and most recent modification date of any item in the folder.”

PFDAVADMIN can be found here.


If you try no run this tool directly for you Exchange 2007 Server (not advisable!), you will probably get 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"


You will always get this error message if the server/workstation you are running PFDAVADMIN does not have Microsoft .NET Framework v1.1 installed (Exchange 2007 uses the v2.0 Framework).

I had .Net Framework 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4 on my workstation and it didn’t work. As soon as I installed 1.1, it worked perfectly.

So, don’t install v1.1 on your Exchange server, but on a workstation and run the tool from there!