Best Practices for Public Folders to SharePoint...

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written by Sergey Goncharenko, Software Analyst, Quest Software, Inc. Best Practices for Public Folders to SharePoint Migration Technical Brief

Transcript of Best Practices for Public Folders to SharePoint...

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written bySergey Goncharenko,

Software Analyst,Quest Software, Inc.

Best Practices for Public Folders to SharePoint Migration

Technical Brief

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TBW_BP_PubFoldToSharePointMigr_102406_NH

© Copyright Quest® Software, Inc. 2006. All rights reserved.

This guide contains proprietary information, which is protected by copyright. The software described in this guide is furnished under a software license or nondisclosure agreement. This software may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of the applicable agreement. No part of this guide may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording for any purpose other than the purchaser's personal use without the written permission of Quest Software, Inc.

WARRANTY

The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice. Quest Software makes no warranty of any kind with respect to this information. QUEST SOFTWARE SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF THE MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Quest Software shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or other damage alleged in connection with the furnishing or use of this information.

TRADEMARKS

All trademarks and registered trademarks used in this guide are property of their respective owners.

World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 www.quest.com e-mail: [email protected] U.S. and Canada: 949.754.8000

Please refer to our Web site for regional and international office information.

Updated—October 23, 2006

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CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................1 1.1 MIGRATION TEAM .................................................................................... 2

2. ANALYZING MIGRATION SCOPE..............................................................3 2.1 PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS ............................................................................. 3 2.2 DEFINE SCOPE OF MIGRATION...................................................................... 5 2.3 CHOOSING FOLDERS FOR PILOT MIGRATION ..................................................... 5

3. PLANNING YOUR MIGRATION STRATEGY................................................6 3.1 ANALYZE PUBLIC FOLDER TOPOLOGY IN YOUR ORGANIZATION ................................ 6 3.2 ENSURE THAT NECESSARY PERMISSIONS ARE IN PLACE ........................................ 9 3.3 MIGRATION ISSUES .................................................................................. 9 3.4 TABLE—HOW THE DATA WILL BE MIGRATED .................................................. 11

4. ENVIRONMENT PREPARATIONS ............................................................12 4.1 HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE PREPARATIONS.................................................... 12 4.2 PILOT LAB PREPARATION .......................................................................... 13

5. PERFORMING MIGRATION ....................................................................14 5.1 STEP 1—CREATE MIGRATION JOB ............................................................... 14 5.2 STEP 2—ANALYZE MIGRATION RESULTS........................................................ 14 5.3 STEP 3—MIGRATE SPECIAL PUBLIC FOLDER FEATURES ...................................... 14

6. POST-MIGRATION ACTIVITIES .............................................................16 6.1 PUBLIC FOLDER REDIRECTION .................................................................... 16 6.2 OUTLOOK WEB ACCESS ........................................................................... 16 6.3 DECOMMISSIONING OF PUBLIC FOLDERS ....................................................... 16 6.4 MANAGEMENT OF SHAREPOINT ................................................................... 16

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................17 ABOUT THE AUTHOR .................................................................................18 ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC. ................................................................19

CONTACTING QUEST SOFTWARE....................................................................... 19 CONTACTING QUEST SUPPORT......................................................................... 19

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Technical Brief

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1. INTRODUCTION

Collaboration technology has come a long way. From the early days of the telephone and party lines, to review packages forwarded around the office to today’s primarily e-mail-driven, wide-distribution-based approval process. In the 1990s, more advanced document management systems and more mature versions of Lotus Notes brought us the first viable collaboration technology. With the advent of SharePoint, and especially with the release of SharePoint 2007, we find that collaboration has taken another step forward. By making installation a snap, reducing the cost of acquiring the technology and ensuring adequate room for growth, SharePoint has positioned itself as the next collaboration platform. As always with new technologies, older technologies, once seen as powerful and necessary, are deemed obsolete and data follows the path of least resistance.

One technology that had a short but heady period of acceptance was public folders. These allow documents, events, contacts and e-mail threads to be shared to anyone using Microsoft Exchange. Over time, the data in the public folders could grow to be quite large. Now that there is a new option, and Microsoft has stated that new collaboration projects should be on SharePoint, the thorny question of Data Migration rears its head again.

Quest has been a leader in the migration business, learning a lot along the way about the right way to manage and deploy migrations. We were there when companies were migrating to NT4, through the Active Directory (AD) and Exchange 2000 and 2003 timespan and now to public folders to SharePoint. We bring our own unique perspective as a company that, quite frankly, finds it hard to add up all the millions of accounts and terabytes of data we have migrated for most of the largest organizations in the world. But we learned a lot during these migrations, and we can bring these to bear into the public folder world.

This document brings together the combined wisdom of those past endeavors into our new product, Quest® Public Folder Migrator for SharePoint.

To begin, migration is about the project, not the technology. So we combine pre- and post- migration activities into the product by embedding pre-migration assessment (via our Quest MessageStats™ product) and post-migration management (via our Quest® Site Administrator for SharePoint product).

But naturally, it’s the technology at the center of these projects, and this white paper will focus on those aspects.

Public Folder Migrator enables you to perform migration of public folders’ structure and contents into SharePoint Services and Portal Server sites. With our wizard, it’s very easy to create migration tasks and to change the schedule of migration tasks.

It’s obvious that, due to many differences between these two technologies (Exchange Server Public Folders and SharePoint), you may encounter some problems. This document will help you prepare for migration and will provide you with knowledge of certain migration problems. Follow recommendations mentioned in this document and your migration of Public Folders can be efficient and with little or no impact for users in your organization.

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This document is intended for both Exchange and SharePoint administrators. But it will also be helpful to the SQL administrators and public folder owners since the migration process most likely will require some activity from multiple owners.

1.1 Migration Team

Migration of public folders to SharePoint requires the collaboration of different specialists throughout the organization. One can hardly can imagine how a single person can collect reports in Exchange environment, make appropriate changes, plan further SharePoint structure and capacity, ensure that items were migrated correctly in their proper lists and document libraries, make top-level sites and collections, and maintain and configure the SharePoint database. That’s why we recommend that you form a team early in the migration project to communicate and collaborate during planning and performing migration of public folders. Again, it’s the project management aspects that will determine your overall success.

Here is an example of typical functions that may be assigned for each group of persons affected by the migration and their typical responsibilities for this project.

Exchange administrators: Exchange administrators are responsible for managing Public Folder Stores. From their perspective, a pre-migration analysis should be performed to determine the most suitable timeframe for the migration process. Additionally, Exchange Administrators should ensure post-migration success and that new content is being migrated automatically. Lastly, this is the person who will prohibit access to the migrated folders and ultimately delete public folder information if required.

SharePoint administrators: Sharepoint administrators are responsible for the migration process, and will define migration scopes for each step of the public folder migration. They should also plan hardware and software resources for future usage of migrated content

SQL administrators: SQL administrators are responsible to ensure the quality of SQL service that will be necessary for the migration process.

Public folder owners: Although, migrations can be performed without involving public folder owners, the owners or end users may be very upset with the migration’s end results if they are not satisfied that their requirements and expectations were taken into consideration.

Project managers. Project managers deal with projects that can be very large and lengthy, and that require a project manager to oversee all the related tasks and undertake the project management framework that is at the heart of this project.

From the beginning to the end of the migration project, these groups of people should be closely connected to each other.

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2. ANALYZING MIGRATION SCOPE

2.1 Preliminary Analysis

Check the rough overall size of all content that should be migrated from your public folders to SharePoint. This can be accomplished using a third-party reporting component like Quest MessageStats product, a Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folder DAV-based administration tool.

Valuable reports:

1. Content size

Public folder content size will determine the overall scale of your migration. It is important to come to a reasonable approximation of the size of the existing public folder structure. Do not include duplicates or replicas of the same information!

MessageStats Reports

\Public Folders\Root Summary

PFDAVAdmin

pfdavadmin.exe -contentreport -s server_name -f export_filename

2. Public folder owners

Public folder owners need to be made aware of the project, and they will form the backbone of your end-user advisory team.

MessageStats

\Public Folders\Folder Permissions

Ungroup “Folder Name” and “Folder Path” and group by “User Name.” This will allow you to produce a report that shows the owners and the list of folders with the corresponding owner.

PFDAVAdmin

pfdavadmin.exe -export -permissions [xml | pfadmin | ntaccount] -s server_name -f export_filename

Filter the information to produce an owners’ list with their folders. You can use Excel for these purposes.

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3. Distribution of items class

MessageStats

\Content Analysis\Public Folder Content\Item Count by Class

PFDAVAdmin

UNAVAILABLE

4. Very old and unused folders

Migration is a perfect time to purge old or unused data and save some space in the target environment.

MessageStats

\Public Folders\Folder Details

For example, insert the last access date and last modification date to and find folders with very old access dates. You can sort folders by this date form or use Quick Filter functionality to limit reports going to those folders that were last accessed a long time ago.

PFDAVAdmin

pfdavadmin.exe -contentreport -s server_name -f export_filename

To find old, unused folders, you can filter the folders based on “Newest Modification Date” filed, which includes the date of most recently modified item.

5. Other

Other reports may be significant, such as a list of servers or types of content, etc.

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2.2 Define Scope of Migration

When rough estimates and tests are complete, it is time for an accurate analysis of your public folder structure. Divide the root public folder tree into specific tasks, which should be migrated separately into different sites or content databases. This will help to achieve optimal performance for sites and optimal capacity of content databases.

Next, define root folders, which will be migrated separately. For example, in a group of folders where each of them stands for a particular department of your organization, it would be useful to migrate each folder into separate sites to maintain the existing information hierarchy.

2.3 Choosing Folders for Pilot Migration

Before migrating folders in your production environment, you should check that everything runs correctly in a test environment. Choose a folder’s subtree, which is owned by a single person, so that it will be easier to communicate with the owner.

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3. PLANNING YOUR MIGRATION STRATEGY

3.1 Analyze Public Folder Topology in Your Organization

In large organizations with geographically dispersed sites, servers with public folders residing on them can be situated in different locations all over the world. There are a few things to consider when planning a migration of such a distributed environment.

Public folders with many replicas will be migrated into a single SharePoint location

In large Exchange deployments, public folders can be replicated to Exchange servers located in many geographical sites across the organization to meet the performance requirements and cut on the wide area network (WAN) traffic expenses. Since SharePoint does not provide content replication and synchronization services, the data can be stored only in one location. When a folder with multiple distributed replicas is migrated to a SharePoint server, users that are accessing the migrated content will be redirected to a single location no matter where they are situated. This might result in increased WAN traffic and response time. Therefore, you should carefully consider the SharePoint target location for the content of geographically dispersed public folders when planning your migration to SharePoint.

Regional public folders

Regional public folders are the folders that are primarily used within a single location or site in your organization. It’s recommended to migrate such folders to a SharePoint server that is geographically located in the same site. In doing so, you’ll avoid unnecessary WAN traffic caused by content migration and user requests for the migrated public folder content. Some tips on planning distributed SharePoint environments can be found in the “Planning and Designing SharePoint Products and Technology Solutions for Geographically Dispersed Sites” white paper. You can download this document at http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=DC101057761033&CTT=5&Origin=HA100780851033

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Technical Brief

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Security permission migration

Quest Public Folder Migrator is able to migrate security permissions from public folders to SharePoint sites and lists. The canned permission mapping rules in Quest Public Folder Migrator are designed to match the source public folder permissions on the SharePoint side as closely as possible. However, due to significant differences between permission models of Exchange Server and SharePoint 2003/2007, in certain migration scenarios, it is technically impossible to retain users’ access to the migrated data without granting them more permissions than they had for the source public folders. It’s recommended to test your migration process in a lab first so that you understand the trade-offs of the permission mapping.

Sometimes it may be much easier to assign permissions from scratch on the target SharePoint site. It will take you some time to set all the required permissions, but on the other hand, you will ensure strong security on the target. The best practice is to grant access to user groups instead of individual users, and add users to site groups.

Mapping of information structure

Unlike Exchange public folders, SharePoint features various types of containers you can use to structure your data (lists, document libraries, sites, workspaces, etc.). You should think about how you want to map your existing public folder structure to SharePoint. This is something that should be decided with folders owners before migrating folders to SharePoint. Public Folder Migrator comes with three built-in migration job types that enable a wide range of migration scenarios:

• Folder to list

• Folder tree to document library

• Folder tree to sites

You need to consider which of the scenarios in Public Folder Migrator best fits your needs. You can find the detailed information on the built-in migration scenarios in the Public Folder Migrator User’s Guide.

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Performance considerations

Microsoft has provided performance recommendations for SharePoint 2003 in the “Capacity Planning for Windows SharePoint Services” chapter of the WSS v2 Administrator Guide. The recommendations suggest the optimal maximum number of items in every SharePoint container object:

Site collections Database 50,000 Total throughput degrades as the number of site collections increases.

Web sites Web site 2,000 The interface for enumerating subsites of a given Web site does not perform well beyond 2,000 subsites.

Web sites Site collection

250,000 You can create a very large total number of Web sites by nesting the subsites. For example, 100 sites each with 1000 subsites is 100,100 Web sites.

Documents Folder 2,000 The interfaces for enumerating documents in a folder do not perform well beyond a thousand entries.

Documents Library 2 million You can create very large document libraries by nesting folders.

Security principals

Web site 2,000 The size of the access control list is limited to a few thousand security principals; in other words, users and groups in the Web site.

Users Web site 2 million You can add millions of people to your Web site by using Microsoft Windows security groups to manage security instead of using individual users.

Items List 2,000 The interface for enumerating list items does not perform well beyond a few thousand items.

Web Parts Page 100 Pages with more than 100 Web Parts are slow to render.

Web Part personalization

Page 10,000 Pages with more than a few thousand user personalizations are slow to render.

Lists Web site 2,000 The interface for enumerating lists and libraries in a Web site does not perform well beyond a few thousand entries.

Document size File 50 MB The File Save performance degrades as the file size grows. The default maximum is 50 megabytes (MB). This maximum is enforced by the system, but you can change it to any value up to 2 gigabytes (GB) (2047 MB) if you have applied Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1. For more information, see Configuring large file support in Installing and Using Service Packs for Windows SharePoint Services.

Take these recommendations into account when designing your target environment. For better performance, you might want to separate some public folder trees and migrate them into different content databases on SharePoint.

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3.2 Ensure that Necessary Permissions Are In Place

In order for Quest Public Folder Migrator to migrate your public folder data to SharePoint, you need to make sure that the required Exchange and SharePoint permissions are granted to the accounts used by the product. Refer to the Quest Public Folder Migrator for SharePoint User’s Guide for a complete description of the required permissions.

In particular, you’ll need to set owner access to SharePoint content databases. You can find content database names using one of the following:

1. Via SharePoint Central Administration Web site: Open the SharePoint Central Administration site, go to Configure Virtual Server Settings, click your target virtual server and open the Manage Content Databases link.

2. Via Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint: Right-click your target SharePoint virtual server in the server tree and select Virtual Server Tasks | Virtual Server Settings | Manage Content Databases.

3.3 Migration Issues

When migrating public folders to SharePoint, there are a number of possible issues that you should consider and proactively work to avoid. Identifying possible problems and resolving them prior to the migration will ensure a smoother migration.

URL path

SharePoint has limited maximum depth of URL paths to documents. URLs longer than 255 characters are not supported in Windows SharePoint Services. Note that this character limit is for the URL and descriptions. Ensure that URL paths of migrated items will not exceed this limitation. During migration, such folders and files will be automatically omitted by Public Folder Migrator.

Custom site templates and site definitions

Public Folder Migrator supports only default site definitions which are based on Team Web Site (STS) definition and Meeting Workplace (MPS) definition. Public Folder Migrator does not support custom site definitions. If you want to add support for such definitions in Public Folder Migrator, please contact Quest Technical Support.

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Folder items of custom classes

Out of the box, Public Folder Migrator only supports default classes of public folder items, such as IPF.Note or IPF.Contact. In order to add support of items of custom classes, contact Quest Technical Support.

Custom properties of public folder items

Public Folder Migrator comes with predefined mapping rules that only map default public folder item properties to SharePoint list columns. You can modify the mapping rules if necessary to support migration of custom item properties to SharePoint. Please, please contact Quest Technical Support for help.

Post-migration items modifications

Public Folder Migrator will not synchronize changes to source public folder items that were modified after the migration job has been finished. Only the items that appear in the source folder will be synchronized to SharePoint.

Non-supported public folder features

Public Folder Migrator won’t be able to migrate some public folder features to SharePoint because there is no similar functionality available in SharePoint. These features include

1. Public folder moderation

2. Public folder forms

3. Workflow applications in public folder

4. Rules

5. Subscriptions

Consider excluding such folders from migration if you rely on these public folder features.

Database growth limit

SQL database administrators can set up a limit for database growth. Ensure that this is set high enough to allow for a full migration to proceed. After the limit is surpassed, the migration will not be able to continue successfully.

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Unsupported characters

In addition to tab characters and multiple periods, the following characters are not supported in Windows SharePoint Services:

/\:*?"<>|#{}%&~

All of these characters can be used in either item or folder names (except : (colon)). If a file, folder, or URL name in your original public folder store contains one of these characters, it will be replaced with an underscore (_). Multiple periods are replaced with a single period. Additional digits may be appended to the file or folder name if there are conflicting renaming changes. Again, track these files down as much as possible during the migration to ensure a more successful migration.

3.4 Table—How the Data Will Be Migrated

Parameter Before Migration Migrated

Item or folder with special characters

Include /\*?"<>|#{}%&~ or tab characters

All special characters will be substituted by “_”

Folder or item path Consists of more than 255 characters

Won’t be migrated

Folder rules and subscriptions; applications and forms

Skipped

Items of custom message class

Won’t be migrated

Custom item’s properties Won’t be migrated1

Modified and new items after migration were accomplished

Only new items will be migrated

Item or folder with special characters

Multiple periods Will be changed to one period

1 However there is possibility to change property mapping rules. PF Migrator has a bunch of XML files which define mapping rules for item’s properties mappings and definitions for special SharePoint List templates.

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4. ENVIRONMENT PREPARATIONS

4.1 Hardware and Software Preparations

SQL Server

Based on acquired rough estimations, you should check that your hardware will accommodate migrated data. Check that SQL servers on which the data will be stored have the necessary capacity and that they have the necessary space for extension of their performance. You can check The Capacity Planning section of the SharePoint Services Administrator’s guide for more information.

Backup and maintenance

Production migrations will most likely result in a huge amount of data being moved. Therefore, it is usually better to run the migration during off-peak network periods. Unfortunately, as every Information Technology (IT) administrator knows, this is usually at night or on the weekends! However, backup and maintenance tasks for Exchange servers are most likely scheduled at the same time, as well as other applications. While some companies have Quality of Service frameworks that may help, the vast majority of people will have to develop a schedule that works. One recommendation is to do separate migrations and maintenance tasks so that migration can be performed with no additional load on Exchange servers or other applications.

MSMQ on migration task execution server

Public Folder Migrator uses MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue) to transfer messages from the source to the target. By default, Windows OS stores messages for these queues in the system32 folder. Usually system disk partition on servers is not very large, and during the migration process large documents can significantly reduce available disk space on this partition. Also, system partition may be allocated on slow devices (IDE for example) so you might want to change paths for MSMQ in order to speed up migration process by using quick hard drives and avoiding disk space shortage on the system partition.

Anti-virus software

Although migration shouldn’t cause any conflicts with anti-virus software (migration is being performed on the back-end SQL side and SharePoint anti-virus software is usually working through SharePoint API), we recommend turning off the anti-virus during migration. Once migration is completed, you can enable the anti-virus back and scan the migrated content for viruses.

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4.2 Pilot Lab Preparation

Always try to prepare a test lab that resembles your real production environment as much as possible. This will make simulation of future migration on production servers more realistic.

Take the folder tree that was chosen for pilot lab and export it (for example, using export to PST file (Personal Storage) option in Microsoft Outlook; you can also use any other tool that would be suitable for you). If you’re using PST file to export public folder contents, you will lose permissions associated with these folders. You can restore them in your pilot lab, for example, by using PFDAVAdmin tool.

Finally, you should import the dumped tree to Exchange server in your pilot lab.

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5. PERFORMING MIGRATION

5.1 Step 1—Create Migration Job

Using Migration Job Wizard, create a new migration job. You can create a disabled job first and then edit the schedule using the Migration Scheduling Wizard. Schedule the migration agent for off-peak hours to minimize load on your production Exchange servers. When you are ready for the migration, enable the migration job in the Public Folder Migrator console.

We recommend enabling the option to redirect users in the migration job to smoothly switch your users to SharePoint. In some cases, it may be preferable to select the switch date that will let you analyze migration results and perform some other post-migration activities before users are redirected to SharePoint.

5.2 Step 2—Analyze Migration Results

Along with the folder owner, you should ensure that content was migrated properly into the proper location. Make sure that new content that users might continue to post into public folders is being migrated to SharePoint.

5.3 Step 3—Migrate Special Public Folder Features

You can manually emulate some exclusive features of public folders that can’t be migrated in order to be able to use them on SharePoint.

Subscriptions and moderated folders

Subscriptions and Moderated Folders can be translated to alerts and approvals.

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First of all, you should get a list of all moderators and subscribers of the public folder in question. Then you should change properties of the target SharePoint list or document library as follows.

1. Turn on approvals for the document library or list.

2. Moderators should have Manage Lists right, so you should add this right for corresponding users or user groups.

If you’re migrating permissions with PF Migrator, this role will be assigned in the followingcases:

1. To Folder Owners 2. To those users who have “Edit Items –All” right 3. To those users who have “Delete Items –All” right

See “Public Folder Migrator – User Guide” for more details on permissions mapping.

3. Instruct users that they should create their own alerts for the document library or the list in order to receive notifications on new items and other changes.

You can use Quest Site Administrator for these purposes. This product features site policies, which allow you to easily propagate such site settings to necessary sites

Outlook Forms

Partially, forms functionality in public folders can be emulated with Microsoft InfoPath forms and SharePoint forms library. Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 will introduce more powerful functionality for building business workflows and applications.

Mail-enabled folders

You can do the following:

1. Keep migration job for the mail-enabled folder enabled

2. Configure Mailbox Manager in Exchange to delete all old content from the mail-enabled public folder

To avoid duplicate content, all messages sent to the migrated public folder will be forwarded to the target SharePoint location.

Rules

Some rules can be converted into custom views in SharePoint. Besides the ability to filter out content in document libraries and lists, custom views can be used to group, sort, count totals and change the visual representation of list or library content. Some sets of folder rules can be translated to alerts and approvals.

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6. POST-MIGRATION ACTIVITIES

6.1 Public Folder Redirection

Ensure that public folders redirect users to the proper SharePoint site within Microsoft Outlook. They should be able to get directly to the new SharePoint site and interact with the site just as if they were in Internet Explorer®.

6.2 Outlook Web Access

Since user redirection only works for Microsoft Outlook and not for Outlook Web Access (OWA), users can access and modify data in the migrated public folders using OWA. Note that all new items that users post through OWA to public folders will continue to migrate as long as the corresponding migration job is enabled. However, after the migrated public folder were decommissioned, users who were using OWA won’t be able to access their content. You should educate your OWA users on how to access the migrated content when the migration completes. For these purposes, you can make you SharePoint sites accessible from the outside of your corporate network, via the Internet. You can do this securely, with ISA (Information Security) server web server publishing, for example. You can consider redirecting requests to public folders virtual directory to the SharePoint site using properties of the Public virtual directory on the IIS (Internet Information Services) server. In any case, you will have to expose your SharePoint site to the extranet, or force your users to VPN (Virtual Private Network) into the network to access the SharePoint servers. You can hide public folders in the OWA user interface; use the Microsoft OWA Web Administration tool to do that.

6.3 Decommissioning of Public Folders

Migrated public folders should only be decommissioned after all the stakeholders are satisfied with the migration project results. A suitable backup solution should be used to retain the data of the migrated folders in case it is needed for any reason again.

6.4 Management of SharePoint

The migration project should not be deemed successful until a viable management approach for the target SharePoint environment has been decided upon and implemented. Use third-party tools such as Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint to ensure that you keep a handle of your new collaboration platform.

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CONCLUSION

As with all migrations, they can prove difficult and unsuccessful if they lack the proper upfront planning and/or management afterwards. Many times, it is not the fault of the software tools utilized for a migration, but through lack of proper understanding and planning for the migration. Tools from Quest Software, like Public Folder Migrator for SharePoint, can alleviate the resource strain and reduce the risk of errors associated with manual migrations if you couple them to comprehensive pre and post migration planning. Public Folder Migrator efficiently manages bulk migrations, all while preserving the folder hierarchy, ensuring data consistency and availability. And with your data assets moved to the SharePoint Server, you can benefit from its advanced features to enhance information sharing and document collaboration, increasing individual and team productivity.

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Best Practices for Public Folders to SharePoint Migration

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sergey Goncharenko is a Software Analyst for Quest Software with expertise in Exchange and SharePoint solutions. Prior to joining Quest Software, he worked as a support consultant for Intermedia.NET, a U.S. Web-hosting company that also provides such services as Exchange hosting and SharePoint hosting. Sergey holds a master’s degree in mechanics and applied mathematics from Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia.

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Technical Brief

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ABOUT QUEST SOFTWARE, INC.

Quest Software, Inc. delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and Windows infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 18,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest’s Windows Management solutions simplify, automate and secure Active Directory, Exchange and Windows, as well as integrate Unix and Linux into the managed environment. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe and at www.quest.com.

Contacting Quest Software

Phone: 949.754.8000 (United States and Canada)

Email: [email protected]

Mail: Quest Software, Inc. World Headquarters 5 Polaris Way Aliso Viejo, CA 92656 USA

Web site www.quest.com

Please refer to our Web site for regional and international office information.

Contacting Quest Support

Quest Support is available to customers who have a trial version of a Quest product or who have purchased a commercial version and have a valid maintenance contract. Quest Support provides around the clock coverage with SupportLink, our web self-service. Visit SupportLink at http://support.quest.com

From SupportLink, you can do the following:

• Quickly find thousands of solutions (Knowledgebase articles/documents).

• Download patches and upgrades.

• Seek help from a Support engineer.

• Log and update your case, and check its status.

View the Global Support Guide for a detailed explanation of support programs, online services, contact information, and policy and procedures. The guide is available at: http://support.quest.com/pdfs/Global Support Guide.pdf