Public Folder Migration, and Synchronization

When moving from one version of Exchange to another version, or to Office 365 we always need to make sure we perform an inventory as such, in other words an analysis of what we currently have. Look at it like moving house, where you start to review what you have and some of your items go in boxes which will be moved (Transformed), other items go into storage (archive), and other items are throw away (Deleted). More details on what do we need to do before we migrate, or a guide to starting a migration project can be found at these blogs.

One of the items, which will come up, will be what do we do with Public Folders?

First let's take a look at the different options available to us and specifically we will focus on migrating on premises Public Folders, to Office 365.

Once we have performed our analysis and understand what Public Folders we have and we know which ones we want to migrate let’s review and understand what we have to our disposable natively to allow us to migrate PF’s over to Office 365. This is the first useful link I found on this topic “Use batch migration to migrate legacy public folders to office 365 and Exchange online”

The first few things I notice is that we can only migrate Public Folders using this method from Exchange 2007 SP3 RU15, and Exchange 2010 SP3 RU8 it also mentions that Exchange 2003 is not supported, basically you would need to move all public folder databases and replicas to Exchange 2010 SP3 RU8 or later, or Exchange 2007 SP3 RU10 or later. More details on this I found in the link above.

From reviewing this article even more it appears that you only have 8 steps to run through to migrate your Public Folders well that doesn’t seem to bad, however there are a lot of sub steps, and considerations you need to think about when embarking on something like this.

There is also another option listed where you can use Outlook PST export feature. However, the first line mentions, “We recommend that you don’t use Outlooks PST export feature”.

So as a review we see there are some options available which seem to be very manual intensive, now I am sure folks can script these items but what does stand out to me, is that I do not see native options to migrate Public Folders over time to Office 365, and maybe synchronize these Public Folders?

Well there is a solution available to do this and is comes with E2E Complete and is the Public Folder solution in the application.

With the solution you have two options available to migrate Public Folders to Office 365, using PowerShell or the MAPI method. Using the MAPI method provides a lot of different options for you where you can be very selective of the Public Folders you want to migrate, or should we use the term synchronize as this is where we have a lot of power with the solution and we can do bi-directional synchronization between source, and target Public Folders.

Let’s take a close look at this functionality, first we see that you can highlight a folder and you will get an idea of how many items, and the size of the folder:

Now to set up a Migration job for Public Folders we can select the folder from the left hand pane, and we drag this folder to where we want to put this on the right hand side pane, and when we do this we get the following configuration pane:

As you see from here it is just a drag and drop process from “Source Folders” to “Target Folders”. Once you have done this you will then see the following screen:

As you see from here you are able to set the Sync Interval in minutes, check the box for “Bi-Directional” sync. Let’s dig into this feature a bit more as this is exciting where you can synchronize your public folders between source, and target environment. This means users can make updates either on source, or target and the updates will be made in either environment and this includes a target environment of Office 365.

You can also manage the conflict resolution for your environment, and you can also be very specific with what sub folders you want to migrate.

Once select ok, or submit you can then monitor the migration of public folder in the following view:

The other useful utility to use would be the Public Folder Monitor where you can get even more detailed information related to the Public Folders you are processing:

Hopefully this blog has provided you some insight into how E2E Complete can assist with moving or copying this Public Folders over to a new version of Exchange on premises, or over to Office 365.