SharePoint offers a number of advantages over Exchange Server Public Folders such as better document management system, advanced permissions management system, visually aesthetic and customizable GUI and a lot more. Taking these advantages into consideration, Microsoft suggests its customers to move their data from Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint. Ironically, there is no any specialized software provided by Microsoft for the same. There are a number of third-party software available for this purpose. However, organizations working on tighter budgets may find it difficult to purchase license of specialized software. Thankfully, there is a provision of manual migration from Exchange Server Public Folder to SharePoint which does not require you to purchase any license.
Exchange Server Public Folders contain different data types – emails, contacts, calendar items, tasks etc. Process for migrating from Public Folder to SharePoint may vary depending on the data type. In this article we will see how to migrate 1. Email data and 2. Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks items.
Migrating Email Data from Exchange Server Public Folder to SharePoint
Follow the below steps to migrate email data from Exchange Server Public Folder to SharePoint:
This step involves creating a new Outlook Data File (.PST). To create an Outlook Data File: Go to Home -> New -> More Items and then click Outlook Data File. Create or Open Outlook Data File dialog box opens up. Type the name of the PST in the File Name box as you want it to appear in the Outlook Navigation Pane and click Ok. To make this PST file password protected, type in your password in the Password and Verify Password text boxes.
After you have created the PST file, next step is to move Public Folder data to PST. For this go to the Public Folder and select all the content or the content which you want to copy. Right-click on the data and select Move -> Copy to Folder option. When prompted select the newly created PST file. All the selected data will be copied from the Public Folder to PST. Please note that you can migrate from Exchange Public Folder to SharePoint by bypassing this step, however, it is recommended to create a PST of the data which you want to migrate as Users may keep accessing or changing Public Folder data while you are copying it.
Open a web-browser and go to the SharePoint document library. When the complete path of the document library is displayed in the address bar, copy it and convert it to Universal Naming Convention (UNC) format. After this the next step should be to map a network drive to this UNC. In the Map Network Drive dialog box, specify a drive letter to this mapping and copy-paste the UNC created in the Folder textbox. Click on Finish to create the mapped drive.
The final step is to copy content from the PST to the mapped drive. This will post the data to the SharePoint Document Library. After the data is copied, refresh your web-browser to view the copied data.
Migrating Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks Items from Exchange Server Public Folder to SharePoint
Follow the Steps given below to migrate data from Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks from Exchange Server Public Folder to SharePoint.
As a first step, you need to connect the SharePoint Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks to the MS Outlook. For this open each of these in SharePoint and click Actions -> Connect to Outlook option. After this linked SharePoint Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks can be seen in the MS Outlook under SharePoint.
Open the Source Public Folder Calendar in MS Outlook. Go to View Menu -> Current View and select all the Calendar Items. Drag and drop the calendar items from source Public Folder Calendar to SharePoint Calendar. Follow the same steps for Contacts and Tasks as well. Now navigate to the SharePoint to view the copied items. Refresh the browser if newly copied items are not visible.
In this article we have covered how to manually migrate E-mails, Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks from MS Exchange Server Public Folders to SharePoint. If you are contemplating copying huge amount of data to the tune of 500 GBs are so in short period of time, it is advisable to use specialized SharePoint migrator software such as LepideMigrator for Documents ( http://www.lepide.com/lepidemigratordocuments/ )for the same.