Terry Myerson of the Exchange team finally comes out and talks about the "de-emphasizing" of the Public Folders in the Exchange releases after E12. What is particularly insighftul is the comment by Paul Robichaux, fellow Exchange MVP:

Given that PFs will be officially supported until at least 2016, I think it's a safe bet that the SharePoint folks will provide a distributed multi-master replication facility sometime before PFs fade off into the sunset. My experience has generally been that many of the organizations now using PFs have lots of PF content that they don't need and aren't using, so PF cleanup is always one of the first things included in any supportability review I perform for customers.- Paul Robichaux, MVP

Remember that this will not be a shotgun implementation with your Public folders disappearing overnight. Microsoft has a 10 year support on its server products, which means should E12 ship this year you will have 100% functionality in your Exchange Public Folder infrastructure through 2016. Do you REALLY plan your mail strategy that far in advance? Really? Do you? In 2016 I expect my Exchange server to read my mind, write my emails, strip out any profanities and make me more coherent than my thoughts. I also want it to have an ass-detector of the person that I am thinking my message to - so if they are cool it automatically inserts a snide remark, like the following quote from an unnamed MVP:

No. "De-emphasized". Used in a sentence: "I de-emphasized him with a brick".

Unify THAT Exchange.

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