Migrate Public folders from Office 365 to on-premises Exchange

[Dan Snape]

Anyone know the process for migrating Public folders from Office 365 back on-premises to Exchange 2016? Our customer is doing a tenant to tenant migration. We will be migrating all users back to on-premises Exchange, removing the hybrid/Dir sync, creating a new Hybrid/Dir sync to the new tenant then migrating the mailboxes up to the new tenant. I've just been advised that they also have public folders, so they need to be migrated as well. I'm leaning towards using Bittitan or something similar to go directly from one tenant to the other, but I'd like to know if it's possible to move public folders back on-premises.

[#2]

There is no tool/method available for that, afaik. Unless you want to do PST export/Import.

[#3]

Thanks Vasil. I'll see if I can find a third party tool before I have to go down the export-to-PST path.

[#4]

Doing a bit more digging into this issue, I found this technet article on hybrid deployments. To quote:

Public folders are supported in Office 365, and on-premises public folders can be migrated to Office 365. Additionally, public folders in Office 365 can be moved to the on-premises Exchange 2016 organization. Both on-premises and Office 365 users can access public folders located in either organization using Outlook on the web, Outlook 2016, Outlook 2013, or Outlook 2010 SP2 or newer. Existing on-premises public folder configuration and access for on-premises mailboxes doesn’t change when you configure a hybrid deployment.

Unfortunately I can't find anything about how to move the public folders in Office 365 to the on-premises Exchange 2016 organisation. I assume I use the same process used when moving public folder mailboxes to different mailbox databases, but in this case the different mailbox database is located on premises, but I'd like some confirmation if anyone has done this.

[#5]

Hm, well I've never heard about this process, and I'm not able to find any references to it outside of said article. Let me poke the Exchange folks on this...

[#6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Dan - I've confirmed with the Exchange folks that this is simply an snafu in the documentation. It will be updated soon.

[#7]

Thanks Vasil. I really appreciate you taking the time to chase this up