So Microsoft is finally doing away with Public Folders. It's a good thing because it gives the Exchange group a chance to focus on messaging, not being a file storage. There is one problem though. The tools to migrate the data are lacking. In particular I want to move the distribution list archives to a SharePoint discussions list. AvePoint's DocAve doesn't seem to do it, instead moving them into .MSG files in a document library. Tzunami's Deployer crashes. Quest has a sales guy following up with me before sending me a trial key. I loathe the pre-sales hoop, especially when you say "free trial" and allow to download the software. Call me after you give me access to it! Finally, I don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a one-time migration tool that I'm going to throw away after it is done.
I suspect I might have to write my own tool. Probably WebDAV to SharePoint web service. My first look into the SharePoint web service is a bit hard to comprehend given that there appears to be no examples around the AddDiscussionBoardItem method. Add to that the fact that Reflector won't let me see the ProcessMessage method contents of the SPDiscussionEmailHandler. It is looking to be a tough nut to crack. How does MS expect anyone to migrate if you can't make the basic tools available to do so? Hasn't someone already figured this problem out? If so, I can't seem to find it, and I'm usually pretty good at finding stuff on the Internet.
UPDATE: This may be a non-issue because it turns out there is a blocking reason not migrate away from Public Folders just yet. We have a "Career Opportunities - Software Developer" DL setup to receive incoming resumes. For archival purposes it sends a copy to a public folder. Inside the public folder I see the message intact and proper. Switching that process to a SharePoint distribution list has resulted in all messages appearing to be addressed as coming from "System Account".
I'm not sure about you, but that makes using the discussions list as a repository for external mail including notifications, incoming resumes, etc... pretty useless. Not to help matters is the fact that the IIS SMTP logging sucks. SharePoint adds no value either as I can't seem to find anything about incoming mail event process logging. To top it all off, if something goes wrong and SharePoint doesn't like it, it just tosses the message without telling you. How's that for a corporate retention policy?