exporting EV Archives for company split

[Groombro]

Hello All

Please forgive me if someone has posted something simalar to this before but i can't find it other than the most basic export instructions.

Here's the situation.

the company is selling a subsiduary that have around 250 users . the new owners understandably want an export of the old archives.

normally i would get my guys to manuelly archive out the users one at a time and send send them out the pst. but once the sale is complete my guys time is billable to the new company , and both sides want to minimise the cost/time we spend on this.

the new owners have there own IT guys but to my knowledge you need full admin rights to run the archive function, which we don't want to grant.

i also don't want to dump it back to there mailbox if i can avoid it as that will just end up a white space i can never reclaim on my back end storage.

so i have 3 questions

1.is there a way to batch job it out if i have the storage and list of usernames so my guys can just let it run and once done we transfer to them?

2. a way to premission the new owners IT guys so they can only export there staff ?

3.another way of doing it i'm unaware of ?

thanks in advance

Michael

[GertjanA]

Been there, done that :)

250 is not a lot to me, but can be a lot of data. You need to do some 'pre-work' to ease selection. If you are still syncing the mailboxes, set an attribute which is selectable in the Export Archive to PST wizard to a unique value. Easiest would probably be the Company, but you can also take something else. When done, and mailboxes are synced, Go to Archives, rightclick, Export to PST, select the value, all archives should show. Do NOT select all of them. I would start with 5/10 depending on your hardware. Also, if you have multiple EV servers, make sure that the archives you export are handled by the server you are exporting from (if possible). Be sure to not interfere with your archiving policy. If you archive nightly, export daily, and inform your users EV might be a bit slower :)

As remarks.

Make sure the users to be moved are DISABLED for archiving. Otherwise, you keep getting new mails in the archive until the mailbox is moved (at least, I assume the mailbox is being moved). If the mailbox is left, and you need to archive it, create a seperate provisioning group and archiving policy (archive everyhting older than 0 days, and remove shortcuts too). Run that archiving task manually, then export archives.

I don't think there is a default role in EV which allows for exports only, but there should be entries in the forum (and KB) on creating a 'read-only' role. Based on that, you should be able to add add the export archives option for those users.

Make sure the export location is NOT scanned by antivirus products.

Make sure the output location has plenty of space, and you can copy the PST's from their onto portable diskdrives (or nas or however you need to transfer the PST's)

Make sure to monitor the storagelocation of EV on your side, because if you use CAB files (collect and migrate), you might see a rise in disk-usage, due to CAB-files needing to be extracted.

That's about it. The export will create logfiles (so you can prove what has been exported), and for the rest: patience..