Strategies for Migrating Public Folders to SharePoint

Some rumors take on a life of their own even after they’re proven untrue. Microsoft’s support of public folders has fallen into that category since early in the Exchange 2007 development cycle, when it was rumored that public folders would be dropped from the product. The truth was more nuanced: Exchange 2007 supports public folders, so we can continue to use them until the end of the Exchange 2007 product life cycle—2016 at the earliest. However, the writing is on the wall, as Microsoft pointedly didn’t promise support for public folders in future versions. In fact, in a February 2006 blog post (http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/02/20/419994.aspx), Terry Myerson of Microsoft affirmed that public folders “may not be in our next major release after Exchange 2007.” The Exchange team has been recommending that new collaborative applications be developed using the Microsoft .NET Framework and the SharePoint family, but that leaves the problem of moving your existing public folder data and applications from Exchange into SharePoint. Let's look at what public folders do and then talk about a strategy for how to migrate your public folders and their data to SharePoint. . . .