This One is a Little Embarrassing

I recently migrated my public folders from 2007 then to 2010 and just now to 2013. There are some good guides out there on how to do this so I am not going to get into it.

http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2010-2013-migration-moving-public-folders/

https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn912663(v=exchg.150).aspx#Scripts

What I will talk about is more of a lesson you should learn than anything technical. That lesson is be aware of the experience you are building for your end users. 

As SMEs (not me, you guys) we can sometimes forget all the little pitfalls that can trap end users. Well just now I played the part of Pitfall Harry.

The issue was public folders were not showing up in Outlook but could be accessed from OWA.



I spent hours going over my configs trying to figure out what the problem was. Some of you are already laughing at me. I can hear it across space/time. The issue turned out to be user error. Because I was not familiar enough with the Outlook client itself I never realized that there was a button to view public folders. I thought they would just show up automagically. 



Once you actually choose to view public folders they will actually show up


Moral of the story, stop and think about what you're doing an think about the end user experience. Also don't be a moron like me.