Import mailboxes from PST into Exchange 2007 using Powershell

In Exchange 2003, one of the simplest ways to move mailboxes from one Exchange organisation to another was using exmerge. It was particularly useful for sites using 'Small Business Server' where the level of data and requirements were low.

In Exchange 2007, exmerge is not a supported method for Importing from PST files. The functionality has been naturally replaced with the Import-Mailbox cmdlet.

Prerequisites

1. Install the Exchange 2007 SP1 Management Tools

**A note on Exchange Management Tools installation pre-requisites**
During testing, I found that Windows 7 already met all the pre-requisites out of the box. However, if you are using an older operating system, you may need to double check you definitely have the necessary setup mentioned in the pre-requisite section.

Log in to the PC which has Outlook 2003 SP2 or higher installed with an appropriate account.

Grab the installation files - Exchange 2007 Management Tools - Choose E2K7SP1EN32.exe from the available options.

Run a 'Custom' install, selecting only the management tools; we do not want to install any other roles on this workstation!  After the install, make sure that you run ALL the same update rollups that have been installed on your organisation's Exchange server(s).  If using SP1, it is important that you install update rollup 9 on this computer now that the Management Tools have been installed.

Rollup Update 9 for Exchange 2007 SP1 can be found here: Update Rollup 9 for Exchange 2007 SP1 - Choose Exchange2007-KB970162-x86-EN.msp from the list.

** A note on account permissions **
If you have tried with an account that does not have the correct Exchange administrator role, once you have fixed the issue by assigning either Exchange Org Admin or Exchange Server Admin, you will need to Logout of the management station and log back in again for this change to take effect.

2. Add Full Access Permissions to the Mailboxes

Next is to add FullAccess to all the mailboxes being imported. This is done using the Add-MailboxPermission cmdlet. I will not go into detail on this cmdlet. Suffice to say that running the following will give the user account 'shaun' FullAccess permission on all mailboxes for a particular mailbox server.

Get-ExchangeServer <servername> | Get-Mailbox | Add-MailboxPermission 
                         -User Shaun -AccessRights FullAccess -inheritancetype all

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*note: this should be executed as one full command. Multi-line for display only.

After you are done, you may wish to remove these permissions, to do so, use the following command:

Remove-MailboxPermissions -User Shaun -AccessRights FullAccess 
                         -inheritancetype all -confirm:$false

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*note: this should be executed as one full command. Multi-line for display only.

Of course, if you wish, you can perform this using the GUI:

Open Exchange Management Console
+Recipient Configuration
+Mailbox and select the users
+Manage Full Access Permissions (on the Action pane)
+Use Wizard to add the account granted full access

3. Using the Import-Mailbox cmdlet

Now is time for the Import-Mailbox command. The Import-Mailbox command has a couple of parameters that we are especially interested in.

-Identity

As the name suggests, this is where you specify the mailbox you would like to use for the destination of the import routine.

-PSTFolderPath

This will point the Import routine to look in the path for the PST files we are interested in. If you have only ONE PST file to import for a specific user, you can reference the exact PST file here and it will import the PST file. However be careful that you do not specify an explicit PST file and pipe multiple Mailboxes to the command, otherwise it will import the same PST file for all users which could have some embarrassing results!

-MaxThreads

This is the number of mailboxes to move at any one time. Now, this will largely depend on the resources that you have available. The typical value is 4, and this is normally more or less acceptable for this operation unless you have thousands of mailboxes, then you may want to increase this. Just remember ultimately you will have hardware bottlenecks.

-ValidateOnly

Using this switch is similar to the whatif switch in other cmdlets (and this one in fact). It will not move any data, only highlight if the process is likely to be successful and notify you if there are any issues you need to take care of.  

So once we have the PST file(s) in the PSTFolderPath of our choosing run the command depending on your situation:

Importing a single PST to a single Mailbox:

Import-Mailbox <MAILBOX ALIAS> -PSTFolderPath <PathToFolderContainingPST>

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Importing a bunch of PST files to their associated Mailboxes:

Dir C:\PSTFiles\*.pst | Import-Mailbox

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Go through ALL mailboxes, and find associated PST and import:

Get-Mailbox | Import-Mailbox -PSTFolderPath <PathToFolderContainingPST>

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So as you can see, this routine is all in the preparation of the environment. The actual commands you run to do the Import are small, sweet and efficient. The great thing about using Powershell for this task is that it is so scalable, if you have a situation where there are many PST's you need to import, this will quite happily do the work.


References:

You Had Me At EHLO...
How to Export and Import mailboxes to PST files in Exchange 2007 SP1
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/04/13/437745.aspx

Import-Mailbox cmdlet Technet reference
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629586.aspx 

How to Import Mailbox Data Technet reference
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691363.aspx