So I upgraded my blog 2 weeks ago, promised more updates, and gave you none.

I've been spending time brushing up on my all-around MOSS knowledge for several reasons including taking the MCTS SharePoint exam (70-630), which I took and passed with a nearly perfect score earlier today.

What I want to touch on briefly today is the move from Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint. Once upon a time Exchange public folders were one of the best ways to store shared calendar events and a quick and easy way for users to store emails, files and contacts that could also be easily made available for offline use.

With the release of SharePoint 3.0 there is now no real advantage to using Exchange public folders, with all the functionality you see in public folders improved upon with the SharePoint features: email enabled document libraries, alerting, Outlook 2007 integration including data made available offline. Microsoft itself is endorsing SharePoint as its collaboration platform to replace public folders in the future.

If you are a heavy user of Public Folders there is no rush to migrate off to SharePoint as MS will continue to support public folders through at least the next major release after Exchange 2007. But small to medium implementations of public folders may want to look at migrating their content to SharePoint.

There are currently no migration utilities available from Microsoft to migrate existing public folder content to SharePoint, but there are several 3rd party apps that will make the conversion painless (eg: AvePoint, Quest). I recently demoed the Quest Public Folder Migrator for SharePoint and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked.

The Quest utility provides many options I didn't even think about including linking the old Public Folder in the Outlook client to the new location where the data lives on SharePoint, even displaying the SharePoint page directly in Outlook. Once you have the software installed and the appropriate permissions where they need to be, the migration wizard steps you through choosing a target Public folder (calendar, folder, or folder tree) and a destination. There are options regarding how you want to handle the permissions and whether you want this to be a recurring schedule that keeps updating the SharePoint site when items are added to the Outlook side or if you simply want to delete the public folder for Outlook altogether.

Moving to SharePoint gives you an easier tool to administer, you can probably use existing team and project sites, and frees up some space on your mailstores: they always have a knack for running out of space, don't they?