We've been speaking to a number of prospective customers over the last few weeks around our new combined offering of Office 365 (for a great email and calendaring service) and OnePlace (for comprehensive email management).

It's generating a lot of interest. But one of the interesting points for us is that a number of these companies like the solution because it solves the issue related to public folders not being available in Office 365.

Many companies are currently running Microsoft Exchange 2007 or Microsoft Exchange 2010 on site and rely heavily on the use of public folders in order to file and share emails. Although this isn't a recommended approach for large scale collaboration and email management, it serves its purpose and many businesses rely on the use of public folders as part of their working process. A lot of these companies would like to move to Office 365 / BPOS but the lack of public folder support stops them.

It was a pleasant surprise to us, but customers have recognised that KnowledgeMill OnePlace solves this problem. By filing emails into Contexts (essentially a shared project area) within OnePlace, companies now have a public folder filing system with all the advantages that OnePlace brings (collaboration, ediscovery, archiving, compliance, lifeycle management - you get the idea - browse the web site for more info). The great thing is that access to the filed content is available in Outlook just like public folders are. You can file emails very quickly whilst composing, drag and drop, file whole folders. You also have access the shared folders on the web, on your iphone, ipad, and SharePoint sites. Very cool. OnePlace is designed to work alongside Office 365 and the integration is seamless.

Another sweet thing is that we have migration path as well (again rather foolishly without even realising it). Our "associative filing" feature means that you select any folder in Exchange (including a public folder) and synchronise it with a folder in OnePlace. This means that any email that is in the Exchange folder is automatically pushed across into OnePlace. Hey presto - an really simple way to migrate your public folder data across. Given that it continuously synchronises the email data it also enables co-existence as you gradually migrate your users across from the on-site Exchange to Office 365.

Although this video is oriented towards law firms, it gives you the idea on how users access OnePlace folders directly through Outlook. It's only a few minutes long so check it out below. Or watch it on the KnowledgeMill YouTube Channel.