I’ve been looking into in integration of SharePoint, Exchange and Public Folders for a client and I won’t lie, there are so many conflicting views on the situation. What I have found is a nice little blog post from The Exchange Team over at Microsoft technet. If your looking into Exchange and Public folders, it may be worth a look:

(extract)

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).

Guidance by Scenario

By looking at the primary scenarios where Public Folders are used, we hope to provide more clarity for your organization, allowing you to invest properly in your IT infrastructure. For each scenario, we are providing specific guidance to help you decide whether Exchange Public Folders or SharePoint is the right option.

Scenario	Use PF’s Currently?	New to PF’s?
Document Sharing	SharePoint may be better option	SharePoint is better option
Calendar Sharing	No need to move	Use either*
Contact Sharing	No need to move	Use either*
Discussion Forums	No need to move	Use either*
Distribution Group Archive	No need to move	Use either*
Custom Applications	SharePoint may be better option	SharePoint may be better option**
Organizational Forms	No need to move	Use InfoPath

* Depending on scope of scenario, use Exchange PF’s or SharePoint
** Depending on the scope of the application use Exchange Web Services and/or SharePoint

While this table is focused on Exchange PF’s and SharePoint, another alternative direction may be to build a custom SQL Server application to replace Exchange Public Folder use case scenarios.

Strengths of Servers

It is helpful to understand why we are providing the scenario guidance, in the previous section. Feedback from customers has indicated they feel a strong push to migrate from Public Folders to SharePoint, today. This general feeling does not take into account, the complexities of the migration. You should first understand the strengths of Exchange Public Folders and SharePoint… Read the full post HERE.

 

Thanks