Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) is a set of messaging and collaboration solutions hosted by Microsoft, and consists of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online.
Unfortunately, public folders are not supported by BPOS. To migrate your old public folders to BPOS, you’ll need to find a workaround.
One of the ways to migrate your old Shared Folders, is by creating a shared mailbox that everybody can access.
The easiest way to set up a Shared Mailbox, is to create a new BPOS account (for example shared@example.com). On a client machine, you can install the Microsoft Online Services Sign In tool, which you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5c2ca866-4107-4ae5-98d5-76bf1b18ff87 .
The Sign In Tool will configure your outlook to access the new mailbox. Once your outlook is restored, you can import a PST file containing your public folders to your new mailbox and Outlook will start synchronizing with BPOS. Off course, this will take some time depending on the size of your Public Folders.
Now, we need to give all people access to this new shared mailbox. One way to do this is by right-clicking on the folders and edit the Permissions of the folders as shown in the figures below.
This looks like the easiest way, but there’s one problem with this method: setting Permissions on a folder is not recursive, so you will need to set these permissions on all subfolders. If you have a complex folder structure with lots of subfolders, and you need to give some people access to all folders using this method, good luck!
But there is an alternative way: in BPOS, you can give other people Full Access to a mailbox. So by giving all the members of your team Full Access to the shared mailbox, they will automatically have Full Access to all subfolders of your shared mailbox. To do this, you’ll need to have the Migration Tools installed on the client machine, and use some PowerShell.
To grant somebody full-access to the shared mailbox, you can use the Add-MSOnlineMailPermission as described in http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee662271.aspx
An example is shown below:
Add-MSOnlineMailPermission -Identity shared@example.com -Credential $cred -TrustedUser admin@example.com –GrantFullAccess True –GrantSendAs True
This will give the user admin@example.com Full Access and SendAs permissions to the shared@example.com mailbox. This is only a basic example, with some coding skills you’ll easily manage to write a PowerShell script to give all users the needed permissions.
To finish the story, the users still need to open the Shared Mailbox. When using Outlook, they can easily open an additional mailbox. To do this, just follow the steps explained on http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-another-person-s-mailbox-to-your-account-HP005242139.aspx.
Good luck migrating to BPOS!