A while ago I did a talk at the Microsoft Techdays in Belgium about migrating from public folders and file servers to SharePoint. In that talk I mentioned the fact that public folders are not dead and that you can continue to use public folders if you really want to. I mentioned the guidance from a blog post at msexchangeteam.com and that guidance has now been updated. You can find the updated guidance here.
The guidance boils down to these main points:
- Public Folders have full support for 10 years after the release of the next version of Exchange Server. That is longer than the initial reported date of 2016.
- SharePoint is the better option for document sharing and custom applications (e.g. workflow) even if you currently use public folders for this.
For many users, the strength of public folders comes from the fact that there is full Outlook integration. It is easy to drag and drop e-mails as msg files in public folders or share things like calendars and contacts. Although some of these things can be done with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint, the features are not exactly the same. Outlook 2007 does not do two-way sync or allows you to drag and drop e-mails as msg files in document libraries. A tool such as Colligo Contributor is needed if you need those abilities. Colligo Contributor works really well and is worth having a look at.
Another strength of public folders is the built-in replication. SharePoint does not do replication but there are several 3rd party tools that can do it such as those from Infonic.
It would be great if the next version of SharePoint would include features such as replication and better Outlook integration because that would make it even easier to migrate without having to incur extra (potentially high) costs for these extra features.
