You’ve made the jump to Office 365 for all your mailboxes. Great! Oh, but what about public folders?
Your business may be in love with public folders. If that’s true, don’t panic! They too can migrate over to Office 365.
However, you should know that public folder migration can get ugly.
In this post, we are going to highlight five of the ugliest public folder migration problems that you get to completely avoid with ExchangeSavvy.
#1: Hitting the 100 GB mailbox size limit can lock you out
In Office 365, like any other mailbox, public folder mailboxes have size limits.
The problem you can easily run into when doing a migration is the size limit. You might be thinking, “what’s the worst that can happen when you hit the limit?”
Exceeding the limit will put a freeze on the mailbox. Microsoft has an automated system that will eventually get around to splitting the mailbox for you. But, this can take up to two weeks. In the meantime, if the public folder mailbox is mail-enabled, it will not be able to receive messages.
Not nice.
With ExchangeSavvy, you don’t have to think about it. We automatically size up and partition the right number of mailboxes for your migration based on an analysis of your existing public folder hierarchy. The whole thing is seamlessly done for you in the software.
#2: Knowing what you are migrating
It is typically a good idea to look before you leap, and that certainly applies with migrations as much as it does log jumping. Especially if you have enormous public folders in Exchange that might exceed the 100 TB limit (there’s a limit of 1,000 public folder mailboxes in Office 365).
The challenge is, how on earth do you figure out what’s in your current public folder hierarchy? Large companies in particular really struggle with this. Their folder hierarchy is so large that many script-based approaches fail to do the job.
ExchangeSavvy makes light work of it and provides both interactive visualization and reporting so that you can drill into what’s there and make good decisions about what is worth migrating (and what isn’t).
#3: Downtime
Yes, downtime. When companies hear that migrating public folders means downtime in the source public folders, it is a no go. There are important business processes that rely on them being available.
Luckily, with ExchangeSavvy’s migration methodology, there is no such thing as downtime in the migration process. You can continue to post into public folders. Your mail-enabled public folders will continue to receive mail. It is all going to work as you expect during the migration process.
#4: Having to restart
Another classic challenge faced with public folder migrations is that other solutions do not fail gracefully if the Microsoft migration API has a problem. Basically, you can’t do incrementals. If you hit a snag, you are running the migration from the start.
That just isn’t how enterprise software should be. Especially with important data like public folders.
ExchangeSavvy lets you see verbose event logging during the migration process. You can stop it midway, and restart it without losing any progress in your migration.
And you can run incrementals all you like. That way, if during the no downtime migration process, your source folders take on new data, you can easily merge the difference up to Office 365 before deciding to decommission the legacy public folders.
#5: Scripts are a mess
The reality is that other vendors’ public folder migration offerings are a hodgepodge of scripts cobbled together with duct tape and chicken wire. That sounds mean, but it is true.
If you are going to transition public folders to Office 365, you need enterprise-grade software to handle the migration smoothly. It can’t be a block-box process where, if things go wrong, you have no idea why and your faced with running the script again to “see if it’ll work this time.”
ExchangeSavvy Public Folder Migrator avoids these problems
Our Public Folder Migrator software is the first enterprise-grade migration methodology to migrate your public folders into Office 365.
Connect with us today for a demo.
