Now that we have an established Exchange 2007 server running I’m starting to hit up against some limitations that users are starting to demand.
One of these is access to Public Folders via OWA. Of course, everyone knows that Public Folders are dead, or at least on their death bed and that I should be looking at moving them to SharePoint 2007 document libraries. However I need to try and do this in a structured manager and migration from 2003 Public Folders to SharePoint isn’t straight forward. In the meantime users are demanding access.
I have got around this in the short term by giving them access to Outlook 2003 on our Citrix server. This works well and they get the access they need but it’s not the end point I’m looking for.
So how do I go about getting these pesky Public Folders off of Exchange 2003 and into SharePoint. My first idea is to create mail enabled document libraries that can hold the Public Folder content. Then by using a forwarding rule in Exchange 2003 I can forward the incoming emails and posts to the document libraries. Once this is established I can direct the users to the new locations and they will be able to connect to the Document Libraries via OWA. Once the users are happy with this solution I can stop the forwarding and have exchange push the emails directly to SharePoint.
This still leaves the problem of getting the existing content of the Public Folders and migrating them to SharePoint. I know that Quest have a tool to do this and I have looked into it, but it’s price is the limiting factor. I will continue to test ideas and let you know the results. In the meantime, if you have already done this and have your own ideas I would be very interested too hear them.
