WSS and Exchange Public Folders

According to the Exchange Server team, Microsoft is “deemphasizing” Exchange Public Folders. Specifically, the company has promised to support Public Folders in existing versions of Exchange through 2016, but the feature will not be improved and might not be included in future versions of Exchange.

Public Folders were introduced in the first version of Exchange in 1996 as a platform on which to store shared data from multiple instances of Exchange and to duplicate key features of Internet newsgroups. Today, Public Folders are most frequently used to store e-mail distribution lists, offline address books, free/busy information from users’ Exchange calendars, and threaded discussions. Some organizations also use them to archive e-mail or store other types of documents, and some workflow applications use them to store data.

WSS can serve as a repository for much of the data that is commonly stored in Exchange Public Folders, including calendars, tasks, contacts, and discussion boards. Outlook 2007 users can now access this data just as easily as when it was stored in Public Folders. Users can also access document libraries stored on WSS with Outlook 2007, eliminating one of the justifications for using Public Folders to store documents. (For more information on this feature, see “Document Management with SharePoint Server 2007“.)