So are you considering a PST Migration into Exchange or Exchange Online in Office 365? Microsoft released a free tool called PST Capture that you can certainly leverage to help you achieve your goals of ridding your lives of PSTs. It's a pretty good tool and purpose driven for finding PSTs and ingesting them in their entirety into those targets that I mentioned before. I think it's a good solution for small to medium shops but not sure about using it for enterprise purposes. I think there are some aspects that enterprise customers are going to want such as:
- Are you really going to ingest every pst and its content in its entirety into these targets blindly? Just think about that for a minute. In every organization there are filers and pilers. Filers are the folks that spend the extra 5 to 10 minutes organizing their inbox while the pilers are the folks that live and die by searching and tend to keep everything. I think having visibility into determining who are my filers versus pilers and then understanding what their PST content looks like is a must. This helps me so I only ingest the content that is relevant.
- Will you be performing these migrations during working hours? When Outlook is opened, then these PST files are locked which prevents some applications in gaining access. I think that enterprises will want to perform migrations during the day. Otherwise, you will be forcing users out of Outlook or only performing migrations during the evening and weekends. If you’re salaried you lose but I guess if you’re paid hourly then you might gain here.
- What do you do if ridding your lives of PSTs isn’t possible? Maybe the justification of disk is cheap doesn’t work anymore and/or it’s hard to beat the portability and offline access of PSTs. In any case, some enterprises will want the ability to allow users to keep their PSTs and at the same time copy relevant and appropriate content to a centrally managed PST, archive mailbox or production mailbox. At the same time, ensuring that PSTs adhere to the organization’s retention policies is a must if you plan on implementing this coexistence strategy.
These were a few of the features that I would find useful in a PST Migration solution. Ok that last item is more of a management capability but it certainly comes up when talking about PST Migrations. What do you think? Are there other PST migration features that you would find valuable?
Happy PST Migrations,
Tri
