[SOLVED] Office 365 Migration tool/tip

[TurricanII]

Hey all,

Using this article...

https://support.office.com/en-us/ar...998153407b8a?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1

...I have managed to upload multiple PST files, map them to accounts and kick off an import with no problem. I have managed to upload a user's My Documents folder to their OneDrive for Business by packaging it, retargeting it, uploading the files/manifest, uploading the mapping CSV and executing the import.

I am wondering what is the most efficient way to package/upload/map/import multiple shared folders/home drives in parallel to pre-created SharePoint Document Libraries on Office 365. Do you have a tool that is cheap and wonderful at replacing the crazy number of Powershell scripts?

When I uploaded the first user's OneDrive I specified the root Azure container in the AzCopy command:

/Dest:"https://5a75d....c8d4c3daf2c406.blo...=gr7ylgzZOdpcziO/MENRD3wu1tnru8ruCaaI4+g...A="

If I were to stick with the manual SharePoint Online Management Shell commands, am I supposed to do multiple parallel imports by running concurrent AzCopy commands and appending a subfolder for each share, e.g. below in bold:

/Dest:"https://5a75d....c8d4c3daf2c406.blo...s-2017041314-3a6459475aa84542898a11e39....cfd/Accounts?sv=2012-02-12&se=2017-07-12T14%3A16%3A46Z&sr=c&sp=wl&sig=gr7ylgzZOdpcziO%2FMENRD3wu1tnru8ruCaaI4%2Bg...A%3D"

I tried this and the files/manifests upload to the relevant subfolders OK, but I get a import Failed error after uploading and validating the mapping CSV file with the SPFileContainer set to files-2017041314-3a6459475aa84542898a11e39....cfd/Accounts

 

[AndrewFergus]

After a very nasty situation where a customer had seven different email addresses with multiple PSTs in each account & swore we lost some of his mail (just had his folders nested), we no longer do 365 migrations manually. Using SkyKick is like night and day the amount of stress it resolves.

 

[seedubya]

We use Bittitan for mail and Onedrive migrations. However, Sharepoint is not a suitable replacement for a file server. It simply isn't reliable enough.

 

[designwebs]

Better call Lisa....

 

[callthatgirl]

@designwebs that's what I was going to say lol.

Sounds pretty messy. I do manual all the time, I only use MigrationWiz if there are more than 5 mailboxes. I'll go read this again and come back, it was confusing.

btw...OneDrive is not a place for Outlook PST or (if this can even happen) OST to live. OneDrive is always synching and so is Outlook, so it's not a good marriage.

 

[seedubya]

btw...OneDrive is not a place for Outlook PST or (if this can even happen) OST to live. OneDrive is always synching and so is Outlook, so it's not a good marriage.

Why would anyone even think that? Especially using Office 365! There's no understanding end users!!

 

[callthatgirl]

Here is how I do them manually
IMAP, I export to a PST
Calendar and contacts, export to CSV
Check for notes and tasks, export as well
make a copy of their autocomplete
Usually now I create a new profile if using Outlook 2010
Then import all into the new profile
let synch up,
Enjoy.

Pop the same except you don't need to backup, just import the PST into the new profile

Exchange, same as pop.

That's the cliff notes version. I sell an ebook that has 24 detailed pages.

 

[callthatgirl]

Why would anyone even think that? Especially using Office 365! There's no understanding end users!!

You have no idea the crazy messes I have seen clients try. One guy said "I put all my PST in OneDrive so it backs it up" and I said, "well, wait for it..." and a day later he called back, Outlook was hosed up. I had to move all the PST back to Documents and remap. Good billable work there.

 

[TurricanII]

Thanks all for your valuable thoughts. Email is no problem, bulk PST upload and import works a treat - sorry for any confusion in my wording.

@callthatgirl - I had some worrying experiences with importing the PST using Outlook. If I created the Office 365 profile them imported the PST Outlook very quickly sucked the PST into a local OST but didn't sync older emails up to Office 365. I never spent any time working out whether this was something to do with the amount of locally cached email or some 365 setting. The client was happy to have old PST file attached as a data file and start afresh with Calendar and Contacts imported.

I worked out that creating one SAS upload URL for each network drive/My Documents was the way to go. Doing that I could upload them all in parallel, each to their own Azure BLOB space, and the Office 365 import is now happily bringing the documents into the appropriate Office 365/OneDrive for Business. This client had My Documents of 10Gb, 19Gb and shared drives of 12Gb and 4Gb and PST's of 14Gb, 12Gb 7Gb 5Gb, 3Gb - network upload procedure I linked to above made more sense to get the data up there. Just such a long process to learn for me.

For the one client I am migrating now, <7 users, spread across countries, working on purely MS Office documents with no SQL and no linked Excel sheets, who never have multiple people working on the same file, I was prepared to move them to an Office 365 SharePoint Document Library!

I had set them up with an on premise SharePoint document library on the free Sharepoint 2.0 ten years ago, and they have been fine with that, so this made them an easier fit into to SharePoint 365!

I think on reflection I will document and use the manual method in future rather than buy a tool and document the use of the tool, because there are such a small number of clients I can recommend SharePoint for file storage to.

 

[callthatgirl]

OST but didn't sync older emails up to Office 365

Did you change the slider to "All" in the email account settings? If you import a PST into an Exchange account in Outlook, everything should sync up.