Major Challenges while Migrating Exchange Public Folders to Office 365

The migration process can be either a smooth one or will be a big headache for administrators. But when migrating public folders, most of the time, it always comes with a big headache or an administrative burden, especially when are dealing with big public folders. In this article, we will be going through the challenges faced while migrating public folders to Office 365.

Although shifting to Office 365 brings the use of Microsoft 365 Groups in action with their collaboration and ease-of-use, the change for the users is a gradual one as it could be a struggle to get everyone on board with Microsoft Teams, Groups, and other collaboration tools of Office 365. In the interim, Office 365 does have the public folder feature.

How to Create Public Folder in Office 365?

Creating a public folder in Office 365 is easy and the same thing as in a local Exchange Server. After logging into the portal by using your global admin credentials,

· Click on the Admin Centers and click on Exchange.

· Click on Public Folders

· Now, you need to first create the public folder mailbox and then create the public folders and setting the permissions accordingly.

So far so good! Well, the easy part is over. But the primary challenge is the migration of public folders.

Major Challenges while Migrating Exchange Public Folders to Office 365

Here are all the challenges that you may face when migrating public folders to Office 365. Also, we’ll also discuss about how you can make this process easier and more efficient with almost no administrative effort.

Complexity

The process of migrating public folders to Office 365 or another Exchange Server is quite complex. The process to export a mailbox is quite easy as you can use the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) and run the New-MailboxExportRequest PowerShell cmdlet to export a mailbox to a PST file. However, for public folders, you do not have that commodity.

The process involves downloading of the migration scripts and the pre-migration scripts. You can download these scripts from the links below:

Migration scripts: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=54855

Pre-Migration scripts: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/collaboration/public-folders/migrate-to-exchange-online?view=exchserver-2019

There are a lot of scripts and from all the migrations that happened, most of them had issues for one reason or another. If you try to understand what is going on with the number of scripts, it’s a messy process that will end up in a huge frustration for you.

Lengthy Process

After you downloaded the scripts , you need to go through a set of processes to get the migration started. First, you need to create the accepted domain which corresponds to your Office 365 “.onmicrosft.com” domain.

The next step is to check that no public folder has a slash or a reserved character in the name. After this is complete and all the offending public folders are renamed, you need to confirm that the public folders do not have any previous migrations, which could be started or finished.

The next step involves exporting the structure of the current public folders so that at a later stage you can import the structure and map them to the online with several CSV files.

Once this is done, the migration process is created and the first seeding is being uploaded, if all goes well.

Downtime

In these times where technology and uptime are critical for businesses, you cannot let the systems down even for a single minute. Having the public folders down during migration would be deadly for an Exchange Administrator since the users and sometimes the business would demand not to have the systems down for a second during migration, which is impossible. Although the Exchange Administrator would do the impossible to try to minimize the downtime, it will happen.

During the migration process, the scripts will seed the public folder. When ready from the first seed, you will need to put the public folders down for the final seed and switchover. Unfortunately, this needs to be timed in a maintenance window to minimize downtime. This, of course, depends on any hiccups that might occur during this process.

Huge Administrative Effort

The pressure is all on the Exchange Administrators and the migration team. The issue with the scripts is that it requires huge administrative effort as it is a lengthy process and involves a lot of steps. If something goes wrong, the headache is too much for the people to burden. Trying to troubleshoot the problem is a big challenge as there is no progress or continuation, if something goes wrong.

How to avoid all this?

Stellar Converter for EDB is an ideal solution to ease the migration, simplify it, and speed it up. With a small application installed on a separate machine or the Exchange Server itself, you can simply attach the EDB, browse it, and export it to PST and other format. You can also export it directly to a live Exchange Server database. In addition, with Stellar Converter for EDB, you can export the public folders directly from any version of Exchange Server database to an Office 365 tenant, without any hassle or trouble.