What about Public Folders vs. email enabled Lists in WSS v3?
The Exchange team did a well thought out and planned post on Public Folders in Exchange 2007 and their 10 year support for them. As well, I liked the positioning around using or WSS v3 SharePoint Server with Business Forms for new app creation. If you were ever confused about the Public Folder strategy or plan, I *HIGHLY* recommend looking at this post from Terry Meyerson, a lot of thought went into this. The MSDN article on Migrating from Public Folders may scare some folks, so I think the exchange team blog post puts things in perspective.
I totally agree that if you're building something new, you should *SERIOUSLY* look hard at the requirements and building on the SharePoint Technologies platform.
At Microsoft they did a survey to their users to determine who was using what platforms and for what purpose. The survey was sent to owners of public folders. A little less than half no longer use PFs.
Scenarios were broken down in order of commonality:
- DLs (email archiving of distribution lists)
- Office Document Storage (File attachments)
- E-Mail Storage (common online alternative to PST)
- Other (development of email forms, contacts, tasks, calendars)
WSS v3 as a platform can handle most if not all of these scenarios. The challenges are the new interface (sure you can consume most of them in Outlook 2007, but it's different). Documents, tasks, calendars, contacts, archived DLs, this is what SharePoint is all about. The next challenge is latency. With PFs you have sync and multi master folder replication. So with this it could eat up bandwidth, but users could get at the data from closer servers. Although we don't have a multi master replication engine in the product, third parties are working an engine on this based on the new change logs.
At Microsoft, they stopped doing PF replication a year or so ago. The DL archiving piece is being worked on very seriously with moving these DLs to SharePoint Server. The strategy of the Exchange IT team at Microsoft is to migrate these DLs and basically everything that can be to SharePoint. This is not yet complete. I'll try to do a post when this is complete and encourage them to do a white paper on the migration challenges and successes.
If you are considering migration, there are a number of tools available for Moving PFs to WSS 2.0 with many under development for WSS 3.0.
In conclusion, with support for the next 10 years, they aren't going away. I do hope you'll find the SharePoint Platform fitting your needs for 90% or more of what you would previously be doing on the Public Folder platform. I recommend looking at the rich integration with Outlook 2007. The SharePoint team understands the Public Folder scenario and is looking to further the investments around transition from the public folder storage to WSS.
Free Extractors:
SharePoint Import Export Tool and Other Utilities
Third Party:
http://www.tsunami.com
http://www.casahl.com
http://www.quest.com
Related Articles:
SharePoint and Public Folders Migration Options (Aug 06)
Are Public Folders Dead? (Jan 04)
SharePoint Connections 2006 Session:
SharePoint Portal Server 2007: A Viable Replacement for Exchange Public Folders?
Emer McKenna
The integration of SharePoint Portal Server 2007 with applications such as Microsoft Outlook illustrates that Microsoft’s collaboration story is becoming more cohesive. Investment in the Public Folder area of Microsoft’s messaging platform Exchange Server has declined over the years with the ultimate vision of SharePoint being the appropriate platform for storing Public Folder content. In this presentation, we'll examine the new integration features in SharePoint Portal Server 2007 and discuss whether the product is truly a viable replacement.
