Advice on pst-migration.

[GertjanA]

Hello all. As I have never done an PST-migration, I'm asking advice of some of you who might have done this before.

Situation - Customer is migrating from old to new environment. (Exchange 5.5 (no EV) to Exchange 2003 (EV7.5SP4 or 8.0), local desktops to serverbased computing, new useraccounts etc) There are several thousands pst's, totalling 1.5 TB.

As there is no EV in the current environment, I can not have the pst's marked. The initial plan is to rename the pst's to match the new displayname (or perhaps useraccount not sure yet), and store these either on a specific server in the home directory, or on a central fileserver. When I am having to start importing these, I seem to understand I will have to match each pst to the specific mailbox manually to make sure that the pst goes in the correct archive (right?) If, however, the pst's are stored in the homedirectory, would EV be able to mark the pst?

I believe I understand that (as long as the pst's are not marked by the clients), automatic import is not possible. If the pst's inthe new environment are in the homedirectory, and accessible via Outlook and the EVClient is installed, the pst's will get marked, and thus auto-import should be possible (right?)

Has anyone done a similar migration, how did you do it?

Thanks for pointers.

Gertjan

[Faxson]

I believe that the Outlook client will mark PST's for users that have not been enabled for archiving (Please correct me if I am wrong).  You could use this. 

It sounds like you know which users owns which PST files via your conversion from local desktops to server based computing.  You could use a scripted solution based on EVPM to import the PST files.  

Ben

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[GertjanA]

Hello Ben, thanks for answering.

Marking the pst requires the EV-client installed (right?)

EV will not be installed in the environment to be migrated, but only in the already migrated environment. This prevents the upfront marking of pst-files. I am not sure I can install the client in the old environment, as there is no EV setup there.

But, thanks for the answer. I'll figure out some nice way to have our desktop-technicians perform the import actions.. Probably will go by vreating a specific map in Outlook mailbox, having a 0-day archiving policy, and have users drag and drop items in there.

I'll post final way to go here.