Changing Public Folders in Office 2013

What are Public Folders?

Microsoft tried in SharePoint 2007, to apply the new Public Folders, and hinted that the Public Folder would die in the next versions. However, so far no other product could compete against the functionality and ease of use of the Public Folder, and that’s why most companies today still use the Public Folder.

So Microsoft decided against the abolition of the Public Folder, and settled on a revision of the concept.

To date, the hierarchy and the contents of the Public Folders were stored in a database and replicated as needed. The problem was that the data was all stored in a “Default Public Folder Store”. In the case of failure, the contents of this database were no longer automatically available – the administrators had to intervene and even move the “Default Public Folder Store” to other servers. Now this problem has been resolved.

The main new innovations of the Public Folders are:

1. Public folders are now stored in a mailbox database
2. Public Folders now support storing in a DAG (Database Availability Group)
3. It is now possible to divide the Public Folders into multiple mailbox databases