In this blog post I wanted to go through the documented TechNet process for migrating legacy public folders to Exchange 2013/2016, expanded with real world guidance gained from field support. I have ...
Updated Oct 12, 2020
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Hi Steve,
The comment in the article for a "fully replicated data set" is referring to an individual public folder as part of validating your existing PF replication is healthy and up to date. For example consider a public folder named 'Sales' with replicas on three different Exchange servers in the organization. A "fully replicated data set" for the 'Sales' folder would be what you have if PF replication is healthy across all three servers and all three servers show the same content if you were to look at each one's representation of the 'Sales' folder.
If outbound PF replication was broken on one of the three servers, then it is possible your other two servers would be missing data originally authored on the server with broken outbound PF replication. The result would be two of your servers would not have a "fully replicated data set" due to missing the content authored on the server with outbound PF replication broken. Essentially this simply means we want to see your existing PF replication happy, healthy, and up to date before initiating the migration.
Thanks Brian, that's reassuring. Just one further related question...
We have several thousand mail-enabled Public Folders on Exchange 2010 and have these as members of Distribution Groups (to facilitate automatic filing of items sent to the Groups). All our user mailboxes are on Exchange Online, so we have the Public Folders configured for Hybrid Mode as described in https://technet.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/dn249373(v=exchg.150).aspx - all working fine. Now we're about to migrate the Public Folders to EXO, I presume the new Public Folders will need to be explicitly added to the Groups the legacy Public Folders were previously members of? With the large numbers involved, we'll have to script it - I just wanted to get confirmation that work will be required because it's not something covered by the migration scripts.