Managing Public Folder Mailboxes
The Public folder architecture has been overhauled in Exchange 2013, and the new architecture is being used in Exchange 2016 as well. Compared to the previous releases of Exchange, Public folders in Exchange 2013 now use the mailbox infrastructure. This helps in utilizing the existing high availability and disaster recovery techniques used for Public folders. There is no public folder database in Exchange 2013/2016; instead, we have public folder mailboxes that store hierarchy and content.
There are primary and secondary hierarchy mailboxes with the difference that one stores a writable copy of the public folder hierarchy, while the other stores the read-only copy. Both of these mailboxes can also store content in them.
The management of Public folders can be done by the Exchange Admin Center and Exchange management shell. In the Exchange management shell, these are the following parameters added to support Public folders with the *-Mailbox cmdlets:
PublicFolder...
