Before Thomson Reuters could move to Exchange 2013, it had to decide what to do with more than 100,000 public folders built up since 2003. The challenge wasn't moving them. It was finding out who owned each one.
Exchange 2013 changed how public folders work, moving them from dedicated databases into mailboxes. For Thomson Reuters, that change forced a long-overdue question. Its public folder estate had grown over a decade on 20 servers, serving 50,000 users, until it held more than 100,000 folders and 2 TB of content. Nobody was going to carry all of that into a new architecture without first asking whether it was still needed.
The people who could answer were the folder owners, and that was the problem. Public folders rarely record a meaningful owner. Contacting the right person for each of 100,000 folders by hand was not a realistic plan.
The crawl produced a data volume view of the whole estate: folder sizes, item counts and the earliest and latest modified dates for every branch. That view is what makes a clean-up defensible. You can see which branches have been dormant for years, which are large but inactive, and which are genuinely in daily use. The decision to retire a folder rests on evidence, not on a guess.
Most public folder migrations stall on the same question: who decides? Putting that decision in front of the person who owns the content, with the evidence to make it, turns an endless governance debate into a process with an end date. The same approach applies whether your destination is Microsoft 365 public folders, shared mailboxes or groups.
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