SysAdmin Talk

Imagine you are building a new forest including a new Exchange 2010 environment. The old Exchange 2003 environment contains a Public Folder infrastructure and you would like to move the content to the new Exchange 2010 environment. No problem you may think, but what are the steps that need to be taken to migrate the Public Folder to the new environment?

Let’s start with the tools you need:

• Outlook installed on a client
• ExFolders need to be installed on the Exchange 2010 server
• PFDavAdmin installed on the client

First step will be to export the current Public Folder content using Outlook which is installed on the client. Keep in mind that this will need to be done using an account which has at least read permissions on the folders you would like to export.

To export the Public Folder perform the following steps:

• Select the root of the Public Folder
• Select the file menu
• Select the option import/export
• Choose the option to export to another program
• Define a location where you would like to save the PST file

Depending on how much data is located in your Public Folder infrastructure it can take up to a few hours or even days to export the data. Once exported you may want to copy the PST file to a location which can be accessed by a client in the new forest.

But what about the permissions since the PST will only contain the data. Well in previous versions you could just simple export them using PFDavAdmin and import it again using the same tool. Since Exchange 2010 you will need to import the permissions using ExFolders which is a replacement tool for the PFDavAdmin, you may think why ? Well the answer is quite simple, PFDavAdmin was using WebDav to export the permissions. Since Exchange 2010 doesn’t contain WebDav anymore Microsoft needed to create another tool which can does the same but doesn’t use WebDav.  The good news is that the files which are created by PFDavAdmin can be used by the ExFolders utility.

So we start with using PFDavAdmin, once opened select File and then Connect. A new window will be opened where you will need to specify the Exchange Server and the Domain Controller which is also a Global Catalog server.
Ensure that you have selected the option to connect to the Public Folder and press OK once done.

When the connection is made successful an overview of all the Public Folders will be displayed. In the upper part of the Window a menu bar is displayed, select the Tools option followed by Options. Enable the enable logging to file option. Once that is set select the Tools option followed by the Export Permissions. You will get some options before the export is made, ensure that you have chosen the option all public folders in the scope part and the account name option in the format part. Press OK when all settings are correct and select a location and filename where you wish to save the file.

So now we got both the data and permissions exported so we can start to import them in our new environment.

Before starting the import check the size of the PST file. Default the ProhibitPostQuota is set to 2 GB which will cause an error if you try to import more data. The ProhibitPostQuota can be adjusted by using the set-publicfolderdatabase cmdlet:

Get-PublicFolderDatabase | Set-PublicFolderDatabase –ProhibitPostQuota 3 GB
The command above will first retrieve the Public Folder database identity and then set the ProhibitPostQuota to 3 GB instead of the default 2 GB.

Next step is to start Outlook so we can import the PST file into the Public Folder. Before this make sure you have selected the Public Folder and got the correct permissions to create folders and place content in them.

Select the import/export option in the file menu and the same wizard as we used for exporting will be launched. Select the option to import from another program and select the PST file.

Make sure you select the correct location to import the data in and then press next to start the importing. Depending on the amount of data this can take some time so don’t do this if you are in a hurry.

When the import is finished it’s time to correct the permissions using ExFolder. Just start the program and connect to the Exchange server. After the connection is made select the Tools menu followed by Options. A new window will open where you will have to enable the enable logging to file option, this is a requirement before you can run the import option. After logging is enabled select the Tools menu again and choose the option Import. Select the file created with PFDavAdmin to set the correct permissions on the imported folders.