Method to ingest mailbox data into another user's archive

[jgirotto]

I have many mailboxes that I need to import into archives that are not going to be associated with those mailboxes. Each user here has a secondary legacy mailbox and I want to put the data from it into the user's primary and sole archive that is associated with their primary mailbox. The mailboxes are numerous (6000+) and large (up to 40 GB).

Currently, I'm exporting slices of those mailboxes to .pst files and then ingesting the PSTs to the desired primary archive using evpm. However, if there is a way to ingest a mailbox directly into a subfolder in another user's archive, I would interested in that solution as well.

Because of the amount of data, I'm running Exmerge on multiple non-Evault servers. I have to run several passes of Exmerge to generate multiple < 2GB pst because of the size of the source mailbox. I'd like to alternate between Exmerge and evpm so I can more quickly place shortcuts in people's mailboxes for the most recent data. To this end, it would be useful if I could call evpm remotely (hopefully more easily than via a remote scheduled task) or copy the evpm.exe and necessary DLLs or whatever to another machine and call it locally.

To summarize, I've got 2 questions:

- Can mailbox data be exported to a subfolder in another user's archive?

(or)

- Can I either call evpm remotely or run evpm on non-evault machines?

Thanks in advance for your feedback and suggestions!

Jeff

Message Edited by jgirotto on 04-10-2008 07:59 AM

[Eloya]

Hi,

this scenario is quite strange from my point of view - or have I understood the initial situation warong? Your users have each two mailboxes which should now get merged into a single mailbox. The content of the second mailbox sould be accessible using a special subfolder of the primary and correct mailbox. Have I understood this correctly?

One way to achive this is to export the content of the additional mailbox in single PST files and import them back using PST Import mechanisms like EVPM in a choosen sub-folder. Due to the given size of your mailboxes which are quite large this is much work given the total amount of mailboxes you have.

The most practical solution from my point of view would be to archive the secondary mailbox completely and to grant access to the resulting vault to the primary user. But you will get no shortcuts by doing so.

These big mailboxes reside on non-managed Exchange server, correct? How do the Legacy Names of these mailboxes look like from both of the original and the secondary mailbox? Are these mailboxes residing in another AD domain?

Another way would be to move all data from the secondary mailbox in a folder names 'Old data'(or what ever :) ). Archive this data. Grant permissions to the newly created archive using EVPM. Move all shortcuts within the newly created folder to your primary mailbox.

All in all it seems like a lot of work for me. Does anyone has another good idea?

Greets,

Nico

[jgirotto]

Thanks for the feedback. You have the description correct. It is a bit strange. The 2 mailbox structure was implemented as a stop gap method to allow for more email space while not impacted primary mailbox performance. It actually worked fairly well, but now that we are going with Evault, we are dispensing with it.

I already have automated the exmerge export and evpm import for these. I decided to go ahead and run everything on the evault server so I could easily move back and forth between calling exmerge and evpm to get the most recent shortcuts populated into the user's primary mailbox as soon as possible. I'd rather not creating multiple archives for the customers just to keep it simple moving forward.

I was originally running exmerge on non-evault servers to increase exmerge throughput, but it looks like I was adding too much complexity by running things on separate servers like that.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Jeff