Jul 25, 2016 - Ever since, the Outlook for Mac client had limited or no support for public folders. This article provides an update on how Outlook 2016 for Mac. Users of Outlook 2016 for Mac can now access public folders in Exchange Online in a number of different topologies. All versions of Outlook for Mac can access Exchange public folders, but until recently these clients could not access public folders in the following deployment scenario.

Office 365 Groups received a lot of attention from Microsoft at the recent Ignite conference in Chicago. Positioned as a single identity that enables group members to access resources drawn from across Office 365, these groups are also regarded as a potential migration path for traditional Exchange resources such as distribution groups and public folders. They don’t exist in the on-premises space but in hybrid deployments, Office 365 Groups can be synchronized back to on-premises Active Directory via the AADConnect tool, where they function as distribution groups. There’s lots of interesting aspects to explore about Office 365 Groups, including the recent arrival of support in Outlook 2016, which is the focus of this article. Outlook 2016 is part of the Outlook 2016 suite and is currently available as a preview edition.

The final version is scheduled to be available in late 2015 and will probably ship at the same time as Exchange 2016. I used build 4027 for this review. Office 365 Groups Primer An Office 365 Group is represented as a group object in Azure Active Directory (AAD). When a new group is created, a provisioning process kicks in to create a shared Exchange Online mailbox, which is used to store contributions to group conversations as well as a shared calendar. SharePoint Online is also involved as it provides a shared document library, which includes a shared OneNote notebook. To save resources, the shared document library is not provisioned until the first time that a member attempts to use the “Files” functionality for the group. All of the resources available to a group are accessed via the single group identity.

Users can be group owners, in which case they administer group membership, or plain members. The membership of an Office 365 group is composed solely of mailboxes and doesn’t accommodate the mail contacts, mail users, and mail-enabled public folders that are often found in Exchange distribution groups.

Microsoft said that external “guests” will be supported in the future. In addition, Office 365 Groups cannot be nested and dynamic groups are not supported. At Ignite, Microsoft said that they are working on a dynamic form of Office 365 Groups but has not given a date when this functionality might be available. Because each group has a mailbox, it has an email address and can fully participate in email interactions.

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Messages sent to the group are held in the Inbox of the shared mailbox and organized as threaded conversations, similar in some respects to the way that email clients organize messages in user mailboxes into conversations. If they want, users can subscribe to a group and interact with the group completely via email. The shared document library functions in the same way as any other SharePoint document library. The big difference is the access mechanism. Instead of access being granted to the library as users join a group, membership is resolved whenever a user attempts to access a library. This approach simplifies the management of library access. Either you’re a member or you are not.

And it also means that anyone who joins a group automatically gains access to group information while those who leave lose it. Groups are either private or public. Anyone can join a public group while requests to join a private group are moderated by the group owners. A group type cannot be changed after creation. This might be possible in the future. Microsoft would like Office 365 Groups to become a user-driven method for collaboration, so the default is to allow anyone to create a new group.

You can restrict this capability by assigning an OWA mailbox policy that disables group creation to user mailboxes (see below). Microsoft plans to use Office 365 Groups with more applications than Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Over time, the idea is to expand coverage across the complete breadth of their cloud offerings. However, Microsoft has made it very clear that Office 365 Groups are a cloud entity that will not appear on-premises. Implementing support for Office 365 Groups in Outlook 2016 Because it’s the easiest way to make expose new functionality to users, Outlook Web App (OWA) was the first client to support Office 365 Groups. Although Outlook has supported shared mailboxes for years, a considerable amount of work has been necessary to create the necessary support within Outlook 2016.