I’ve done a few of these…. but most corporates (at least that I’ve dealt with) use public folders quite lightly – if at all…. so the migrations have been quite simple.

Recently, I was tasked with moving a smaller business (through a partner) from 2007 to 2013 then 2016.

The mailbox move from 2007 to 2013 went flawlessly.

Then we came to their public folders…. approx. 400GB – from which they apparently run a lot of their business.

Ran through the (painful) process of removing trailing spaces, backslashes, dead permissions etc… not hard – just slow, manual and annoying.

There is an article here that talks about the hassle of migrating PF’s – https://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/2013/12/13/migration-modern-public-folders/

On the first migration attempt, the extent of these corrupt items and oversize items was discovered (3000 corrupt items and hundred’s of items that were oversize) – then discussed with the business.

So here we have the first fucking boomingly huge issue with public folder migration…. there are no powershell commandlets to help you get the size of items (you can get the size of folders, but that’s not helpful) that will be considered oversize… so you cannot identify these items prior to migration. To add to that, even if you could identify them, there is no nice way to say “export these items to PST, then delete” or as part of the migration batch “migrate all large items”

The next issue here is that through the GUI, you can see a list of skipped items and why they were skipped (corruption or oversize) – there doesn’t appear to be way to get this information via powershell so you nicely export it and give it to the customer (or sort it yourself)

The business stated that corrupt PF’s weren’t vital, but the large items were needed.

Even after lifting the size limit to 500MB, there were still lots of items that were too large.

I tried to accommodate these large items and found the exchange migration mailbox (a default database which I leave in the default location) – which should only ever be used in transit, proceeded to grow, fill up the disk that logs were on and cause a dirty shutdown and corruption…  so I haven’t my lesson there…. if a client is using PF’s as a file store for items of 500mb over – refuse to migrate until these items are removed…. (unfortunately you need run a “dummy migration” then look at the skipped items list to identify these items!)

Anyway – long story short – the moral of this, very annoyed, story

Public folder migration to Exchange 2013/2016 sucks. It has clearly been put in as an after-thought to appease some organisations – and is only suitable for light users of PF’s

If a customer is a heavy public folder user, do not change the default “large item” size to accommodate them. Refuse to migrate them and notify them the items will be lost.