Migrating Public Folders

In our scenario, the best way to migrate public folder information is to perform two basic steps:

1. Replicate and re-home all the public folders in the Exchange 5.5 system to the Corp site.

2. Replicate and re-home all the public folders in the Corp site to the ElkRiver Exchange 2003 server.

Installing an Exchange 2003 server into the Exchange 5.5 organization allows you to use replication to move public folder information to the new Exchange platform rather than use the Public Folder Connector Agreement in the ADC. Replication is the preferred method of migrating public folder information to the Exchange 2003 system.

Don’t forget to replicate all public folders with content, the Schedule+ Free Busy folders, the Offline Address Book folder, and the Organizational forms folder. Pay attention to all your system public folders. For example, if you don’t replicate the Schedule+ Free Busy folder, calendar information will be lost.

Re-homing public folders in Exchange 2003 is not difficult. Just replicate the folders to Exchange 2003 and then remove the Exchange 5.5 server from the replication tab. Because public folders in Exchange 2003 have no “home,” all that is needed is a single read/write replication of the folder in the Exchange 2003 environment.