Improvements in Public Folder Migration to Exchange Online

[The_Exchange_Team]

We have been working hard behind the scenes to improve the public folder migration experience and are very glad to announce even more improvements. These improvements will help you in faster onboarding of public folders to Exchange Online.

Speed improvements

Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) performs certain clean-up tasks during the finalization phase of the migration. If a clean-up task fails, it is retried for up to 4 hours. Ultimately it will delay the finalization of the migration request. And the delay will be even more if there are a greater number of migration jobs in the batch. We have made improvements to the clean-up tasks that take place during finalization of the public folder migration. After these improvements we have observed large public folder migrations, which historically could have taken 3-4 days, are completed in only 15-20 hours.

Reliability improvements

Previously, if a migration batch encountered a non-fatal warning, a warning which could be ignored, it would still be marked as Failed. In such scenarios, a tenant admin would have to re-submit the migration batch, potentially causing significant delays in migration. We have made improvements in this area. If the migration batch completes with those same non-fatal warnings, the batch is treated as completed successfully. This allows for faster completion of public folder migrations, without compromising the data integrity. These improvements are being rolled out to Exchange Online and should be available to your tenant soon. We’ve love to hear your feedback and please feel free to ask any questions via the comments section below. Public Folder Team

[#2]

We can see the same delay in the Cleanup Tasks for mailboxes. Can we expect improvements on the same as well.

Same for the Failed\Warnings.

[#3]

Hello

thank you for this information and for your efforts to improve the migration of public folders to an Office 365 environment. However, having studied its migration routes closely and realized them, they remain painful. The tooling provided by Microsoft mainly based on PowerShell scripts is, I think, insufficient, the proof is that many third party vendors offer more flexible solutions, and that allow a progressive migration of these data. I currently have under my responsibility a migration project for more than 5 TB of public record data spread all over the world. To be perfectly honest, I don't see myself doing it as a big-bang migration via PowerShell scripts to Office 365 public folder boxes. ;)

Regards

Laurent TERUIN