Public folders were how teams shared content for 20 years. The data is still valuable, but the infrastructure is a liability. Cloud2Cloud Migrator moves public folder content into the right Microsoft 365 home, with permissions and hierarchy intact.
Most public folder estates have grown for decades with no governance. There are active team folders next to abandoned project folders, archives from 2014, and permissions nobody remembers granting. Lifting the whole hierarchy into Microsoft 365 as-is just moves the mess.
Migration is only half the job. The other half is deciding where each folder should land. That's why we start with discovery and reporting on folder size, item types, age and ownership, so you can decide what to migrate, consolidate or decommission before any data moves.
We give you discovery and reporting on folder content first, so you decide, folder by folder, what to migrate, where it should go and what to retire, before data starts moving.
Shared mailboxes suit folders used like a team inbox, such as hr@ or finance@. Microsoft 365 groups and Teams suit collaborative project content. Microsoft 365 public folders remain the right answer for some workflows, such as shared calendars and contacts used by Outlook clients. A compliance hold suits content you must retain but nobody needs day to day.
We map each folder to the destination that fits how it's actually used, and carry its permissions across.
Thomson Reuters had more than 100,000 public folders on 20 servers, dating back to 2003. Every folder was profiled, given an owner by rule, and the owner was emailed to confirm whether to keep or delete it. Deleted folders were archived to PST first. Read the Thomson Reuters case study →
At the IAEA, a failed upgrade had left public folders out of sync and their EV shortcuts unusable. 2 TB was exported directly from Enterprise Vault into shared mailboxes, and EV was decommissioned. Read the IAEA case study →
If your public folders were archived into Enterprise Vault, the content lives in two places: stubs in Exchange and items in the EV store. We extract public folder data from the EV store directly and land it alongside the live content, so nothing is left stranded when EV is switched off. See Enterprise Vault migration.
Discovery produces a folder-by-folder view of the estate: size, item count, item types (mail, calendar, contacts, posts), age of the newest item and who has permissions. Sorting by the age of the newest item is usually revealing. Large parts of most hierarchies haven't been touched in years.
Work with business owners to classify each top-level branch: migrate as-is, consolidate into a different destination, move to a compliance hold, or retire. Folders without an identifiable owner are a decision in their own right. Holding them under retention is often safer than deleting them.
Exchange public folders use their own permission roles, such as Owner, Publishing Editor, Editor, Author and Reviewer. Microsoft 365 destinations work differently. Shared mailboxes use Full Access and Send As, while Microsoft 365 groups use owners and members. Each legacy role is mapped to the closest modern equivalent. Read-only roles need particular attention, because a shared mailbox has no native read-only role. We agree the mapping rules up front so access after migration matches what people had before.
Some public folders receive email, such as an enquiries@ or invoices@ address. If the content moves to a shared mailbox or group, the email address has to move with it at cutover. Otherwise external senders get bounces. These folders are identified during discovery and planned explicitly.
Content migrates branch by branch, with checkpointing so an interrupted job resumes without duplicates. Setting each branch to read-only just before its final pass keeps the source and destination in step and stops people adding content to a folder that's about to move.
Each branch closes with a reconciliation report showing items in the source, items migrated and anything that couldn't be moved, with the reason. Once owners confirm their content, the legacy public folders can be removed.
An illustrative hierarchy might contain a Finance branch used daily as a team inbox, a Legal branch used for project discussions, an HR branch holding shared calendars, an Engineering branch of reference documents, and an _archive_2014 branch nobody has opened in a decade. A sensible plan would move Finance to a shared mailbox (finance@), Legal to a Microsoft 365 group, HR's calendars to Microsoft 365 public folders where Outlook users still need them, Engineering's reference documents to SharePoint as a separate document move, and _archive_2014 to a compliance hold. One hierarchy, five destinations, each chosen to match how the content is actually used.
Lifting the hierarchy as-is. Moving everything into Microsoft 365 public folders is the fastest plan and the worst outcome. The clutter, the abandoned branches and the confusion all come with it.
Copying permission sprawl. Decades of ad hoc grants, including permissions for long-gone staff and old distribution groups, should be reviewed and cleaned up during migration, not carried forward.
Missing mail-enabled folders. If an address like invoices@ still points at a folder that's been retired, suppliers' emails start bouncing on day one.
Leaving Enterprise Vault stubs behind. If public folders were archived into EV, migrating only the Exchange side moves stubs that point at a system you're about to switch off. The archived items have to come across too.
Cutting over before owners have checked. Each business owner should confirm their content and access in the new destination before the legacy folder is removed. The reconciliation report makes that check quick.
Yes. Public folder content can go to Microsoft 365 public folders, shared mailboxes or Microsoft 365 groups. We help you choose the right destination for each folder.
Legacy ACLs are mapped to equivalent Microsoft 365 roles, and folder hierarchy and item ownership are preserved.
Yes. We extract public folder content from the Enterprise Vault store as well as from Exchange, so archived items aren't lost when EV is decommissioned.
No. Discovery reporting on size, item types and age lets you migrate what's in use, consolidate overlaps, and retire or hold the rest under your retention policy.
They're identified during discovery and planned explicitly. When content moves to a shared mailbox or group, the email address is moved with it at cutover so external senders don't get bounces.
Each legacy role, such as Owner, Editor or Reviewer, is mapped to the closest equivalent in the destination, such as Full Access on a shared mailbox or owner and member in a Microsoft 365 group. Mapping rules are agreed up front.
Book a 30-minute scoping call with the engineers who built the engine. We'll map your sources, volumes and compliance constraints, and tell you honestly where we fit.
Request a scoping call →No sales pitch · No commitment · A technical conversation with the engineers who built the engine