SysAdmin Talk

In the previous part of this guide we looked at gaining a list of PST files and machines. In this, the final part of this series, we will look at how to import these into Exchange 2010.

In the last part of this guide the process for importing a local PST file into exchange server was shown. However, in reality it is likely that these PST files are scattered liberally around your network on the hard drives of your users machines as a result of Outlooks personal archiving. Ideally – so that this process is transparent to your users, you’d like some way of finding all these PST files – pairing them up with their users, and importing them into the appropriate mailbox. Here I show you how.

I was going through the laborious task of manually importing PST files into Exchange 2010 SP1 beta and I hit a bug:

Error:
Error was found for (username) because: Error occurred in the step: Approving object. An unknown error
has occurred., error code: -2147221219
+ CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (0:Int32) [Import-Mailbox], RecipientTaskException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CFFD629B,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.RecipientTasks.ImportMailbox

Here is how I worked round it.

With the new online Move-Mailbox functionality in Exchange Server 2010, invoked by calling the New-MoveRequest cmdlet, the time a mailbox is offline has been reduced to only seconds, and as such the end-user experience has been greatly improved.