Update: Scale improvements have been rolled out for Office 365 announced in 10x increase in Public Folder limits.
It has been about two months since I was in Austin at my first Microsoft Exchange...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
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I have over 15000 public folders, with more than 50% mail enabled. By all means, please focus on only 1/2 of the problem. I will just sit over here staying at Exchange 2010. By the time I get to upgrade (if ever), it will be to 2015 or beyond.
Being as our business is project based, every project has both a network folder structure, and a public folder structure (which is mail enabled by the project number as the email address). That allows people to simple CC: the public folder address for all communications
related to the specific project.
Saving each an every email of every project out into the network file shares would be beyond both the user's capability (every .msg would have 100's of characters for file names), and would be an administrative nightmare to try and manage.
There isn't any better mechanism for 'collecting' this information that I have ever found. Lord knows I've looked... and looked... and prayed..
I would love to look at Sharepoint to replace all of this, but hey.. guess what email saving mechanism that uses?