Updated Exchange Public Folder Guidance on the Exchange Blog
"The last time we talked about the future of Exchange Public Folders, was in Terry Myerson's blog post titled, "Exchange 12 and Public Folders". The main theme of this blog focused on the statement that Public Folders are being "de-emphasized". While Exchange 2007 is supported for 10 years from release, those new to public folders were encouraged to look at SharePoint. Since this blog was written, there has been a broad range of questions and speculation about this topic, and we felt it was time to update our guidance regarding Exchange Public Folders.
General Guidance
Since Terry's blog post, there seems to be much confusion over the use of the word "de-emphasized". Many people have interpreted this guidance as "Public Folders are dead, and we need to migrate to SharePoint now!" This is not true. Our updated guidance is centered around the major scenarios in which Exchange Public Folders are used today. Depending on each scenario, the strengths of each server and known issues, you should find our guidance more specific to your environment. For this reason, Microsoft will continue to support Public Folders in the next major release of Exchange Server, after Exchange 2007. This means Public Folders will have full support for 10 years from release of the next major release of Exchange Server. Moreover, Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in SharePoint, which has focused platforms to support discussions, team calendaring and collaboration in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and more mature enterprise content management with enterprise search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)."