Microsoft Exchange Server related News and Articles

I have been reading… reading... goggling and yes everything to find a way for the cross forest migration of the public folder from Exchange 2007 to my Exchange 2010. There are many helpful article available on the net which you may try it.

Few of them are,

http://blog.sembee.co.uk/post/Cross-Forest-Public-Folder-Migration.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2011/03/28/iorepl-and-exchange-2010-sp1.aspx

Of course, many others. Unfortunately none worked in my case.

Scenario - Cross forest migration from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010. User accounts are migrated to target forest and the source exchange org mailboxes are Linked mailbox. So the scenario is to migrate Linked Mailbox to User Mailbox.

Finally, I was doing my trial and error to find a way out. Most of the testing was using the Outlook 2010 and I could find a way to transfer the content of public folder using the import/export and copy folder features of MS Outlook.

Steps are simplified here (will try to elaborate when I get time later),

Note – I recommend only for small migrations, for major migration you must consider for some fairly good migration approach for public folder. And this will only migrate the public folder content (not system folders) and if your target forest already has the mailbox/mail enabled users of all planned users the permission will also be migrated(it happened in my case).

Steps would be,

1. Export the public folder content from source exchange org to PST using outlook 2010 (ensure you use an account which has permission on all the public folders, otherwise the export will not be full).
2. On Target exchange org, add the Exchange Administrator to Public Folder Management role group. This is to enable this exchange administration to create top level folder on public folder.
3. Configure outlook with the delegated Exchange Admin account (I prefer to use an account which has org level permission + the member of public folder management role group)
4. Attach the Exported public folder PST to the configured profile
5. Create a sub folder on the mailbox, call it “PublicFolder” and import the public folder PST into this folder. Will look like below,

      6. Now you can copy each folder from the public folder tree(select the top level folder) and target it to the target exchange org public folder tree (All Public Folders).

You may now verify the permission, if the permissions are not intact I recommend you to use PFDAVAdmin and ExFolders to set the permission accordingly. The major issue of creating the folder structure (public folder tree) and the transferring the content is over here. Permission you can easily deal with using the nice tools from MS.

Share you experiences.

-Praveen