For how many years has Microsoft said that public folders should be removed in future releases of Exchange? I don't know for sure. What I know is that the public folders are here to stay, at least they will remain in Exchange 2013. Microsoft got rid of the public folder database, and therefore also the public folder replication. The legacy public folder architecture has now been replaced; in Exchange 2013, the public folder mailbox is introduced.
This also means that we now have the availability to use the Database Availability Group (DAG) for replicating the public folder mailboxes between servers, just like normal mailboxes.
In this recipe, we are going to create a structure of public folders and finally, mail-enable one of them.