We are on a design for a complete new Greenfield installation for a company, everything will be replaced. Now we are on design for Directory and Mail infrastructure.
The company wants to implement SharePoint, Windows Server 2012, Exchange Server 2013. But in the test lab we found out that OWA 2013 does not have Public folder access. So the mail is Exchange 2010 in our opinion.
Within 2 months we start to roll the project (about 9500 users) and now the client is a little worried. Because he demands Public folders and also Exchange 2013. The problem is, there is no budget for an upgrade to Exchange 2013 later on.
What is the alternative, because some companies told the client to go to Office 365. But there is a problem with that. Government rules are that the AD must be local (not in the cloud) and they use software what contacts Exchange directly (also works as tested with Exchange 2013 and with OpenExchange on Linux, but not with Office 365).
My questions are:
- Is it possible to build Exchange 2013 infrastructure and have a 2010 CAS for OWA?
- When is a OWA 2013 with Public folder Access available?
- Is there a way to FIX OWA 2013 to use Public Folders?
Public folders are used for Mail and Calendar, although Public Folder Calendar functionality is moved to SharePoint in Q1 2014.