Public Folders in Exchange 14…

Looks like Ms has done a slight u-turn over public folders,
ever since I’ve known they have been planning to “remove” or “de-emphasise” public folders in the next version of Exchange, they attempted this in Exchange 2007, but demand (and development timescales) meant they reintroduced a lot of the management tools via SP1.
Now via a statement made in passing it looks like they are still planning support!

Public Folders and E14 – The Next Version of Exchange
Just like a certain segment of the blogosphere is concerned about Windows versions and gets excited every time a notice about “Windows 7” (the succeeding product to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008) comes out of Redmond, I follow, instead the segment that gets excited about E14 – the next release of Exchange Server.
At this point, I would say that we probably know less about E14 than we do about Windows 7!
One of the MAJOR issues that came out of E12 (Exchange Server 2007) was that Microsoft chose to de-emphasize Public Folders. What this means is that they said they would support public folders for E12, but would not guarantee that they would be supported in releases after E12, nor would additional feature content be added to Public Folders.
Microsoft’s stated direction for public folders is the SharePoint product suite. Which, while it does a GREAT job at some things (document libraries come to mind) does poorly at other things (threaded conversations) and does not do some things at all (replication of content to many sites).
Well, in a conversation today it came out that Microsoft will support public folders in E14. Many of us were shocked, surprised, and very happy! The Microsofties in the conversation were surprised that we were surprised – they said that they had told us this ‘way back in 2006! They pointed to
this blog post by Scott Schnoll from June of 2006.
Well, now we know! I’m sure we’ll hear more about this Real Soon Now ™. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.