How to migrate public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups in Exchange Online

Public folders are intended for shared access, offering a simple and efficient method for collecting, organizing, and distributing data within an organization. They help organize data in a hierarchical order. However, users don't prefer them for data archiving purposes as it affects storage in public folders. Additionally, public folders don't support document sharing and collaboration features.

Microsoft 365 Groups, on the other hand, enables you to select users you want to collaborate with and effortlessly set up a shared collection of resources for them. You don't need to manually assign permissions as adding members to the group automatically grants them the necessary permissions to access the group's tools and resources.

Evaluating the shift: Public folders vs Microsoft 365 groups

Collaboration over email	Groups in Outlook have a dedicated Conversations space for storing emails and enabling user collaboration. Groups can be configured to receive messages from external senders, including those outside the organization. Groups make it easier to broadcast information to a set of users.
Collaboration over documents	Groups in Outlook include a dedicated Files tab that shows all the files from the group's SharePoint team sites and files from mail attachments. Groups also simplify co-authoring.
Shared calendar	Each group gets a shared calendar when created, allowing members to add events. Favoriting a group enables its calendar to be displayed alongside your personal calendar. You can subscribe to a group's events, which will then appear in your personal calendar.
Simplified permissions	Assigning users to a group immediately grants them the required permissions, unlike public folders, where permissions must be assigned manually. Users can be added as either owners or members. Owners have full rights in the group, including the ability to manage the group. Members can create content and edit files like owners, but they can't delete any content that they didn't create.
Mobile and Web presence	Public folders offer limited functionality on the web and are not accessible through mobile devices. On the other hand, groups are available on Outlook mobile apps and provide a more robust set of features on the web.
Access to a wide range of Microsoft 365 or Office 365 apps	Creating a group grants access to a wide range of apps from Microsoft 365 or Office 365 suite. This includes a SharePoint team site for file sharing and a plan on Planner for tracking tasks. Microsoft 365 Groups is the membership service that integrates various elements of the entire Microsoft 365 or Office 365 suite.
Folder hierarchy	While public folders organize data in a complex, hierarchical structure, Microsoft 365 groups use a flat structure. All group emails are stored in the Conversations space, and all the documents are located in the Files tab. Additionally, you can't create sub-folders in Microsoft 365 groups.
Granular permission roles	Public folders offer multiple permission roles that can be assigned to users. In contrast, Microsoft 365 Groups have only two roles: owner and member.

Migrating public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups

Batch migration can be used when migrating your email and calendar content from your existing public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups. The steps for performing batch migration depends on the version of Exchange that currently hosts your public folder hierarchy.

Benefits of batch migration

The migration process employs migration batch cmdlets, allowing migration to multiple groups in a single migration batch.
The migrated emails and posts will appear as group conversations, while the migrated calendar items will be displayed in the group calendars.
Batch migration allows you to move public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups without first transferring them to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. The MRS data copy cmdlets directly read the public folder data from the on-premises environment and copy it to Microsoft 365 Groups.
You can select specific public folders to migrate.
Batch migrations are intended to be a straightforward, one-time data transfer from source public folders to target groups.
The migration combines public folder data with any existing content in the group.

How to perform batch migration: An overview

The following steps outline the batch migration process of transferring your public folder data to Microsoft 365 Groups.

Select the public folders that you want to migrate. These can be any folders that contain mail or calendar content.
Create corresponding groups for your folders.
Use the batch migration cmdlets to copy data from the folders to the Groups.
Lock the public folders once you have verified the data in the Groups.
Copy any new data that might have been created between steps 3 and 4 and follow the same process.

During steps 1 through 3, your public folders and their corresponding groups will remain accessible to users. After step 3, you can assess whether to continue with the migration based on the Groups experience. At this point, you can either roll back the migration and resume using public folders or proceed. If you continue and complete step 5, you can delete the original public folders. Even after migration, you can revert to public folders if you have saved your backup files and haven't deleted the originals.

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