How to export /migrate Exchange 2003 public calendar to Exchange 2013 system
Greetings,
I have a client who is merging with a larger firm. My client is operating across a mixed environment with both an Exchange 2003 and an Exchange 2010 server. They have been using a Company Calendar public folder created on the Exchange 2003 server for almost 20 years, which contains all appointments for their legal staff for the many cases they've worked on. There are appointments in the Company Calendar that go back to 2007 and extend up to 2020, so all calendared events from c. 2012 and forward needs to be brought over to the new firm, which is running on Exchange 2013 servers. There are a total of c. 277,000 items in the Company Calendar, so figure c. 50-60% of that needs to be migrated over, based on the desired date range. As mentioned the folder is homed on the Exchange 2003 server, but I have replicated the folder to the Exchange 2010 server for data redundancy purposes, plus any operations to export the folder will be easier when working off the Exchange 2010 server. I need to figure out some way to export the Company Calendar items so the new firm can import those appointments in their present form to the Exchange 2013 server. A few notes on the migration project in general:
- The 2 firms are in different cities.
- There is no VPN between the offices.
- The new firm does not want to deal with any of the existing infrastructure of my client's firm, so they don't want e.g. to use a virtual server replica of one of our AD servers in order to set up a domain trust between my client's system and theirs for the sake of recognizing SID's, directory rights for exported file & folder structures, etc.
- I assume the only way to get the data to them is via some Copy or Export process to a separate PST.
There are several Owners in the Permissions list for the Company Calendar public folder, one of which is the (domain) Administrator user. I logged into a PC as the domain administrator and launched Outlook 2010. I set it up in cached mode. I added the Company Calendar to the Public Folder Favorites, and set up the Outlook account settings to download Public Folder Favorites to help with performance when accessing the Company Calendar data.
I can access all data / events / appointments in the Company Calendar without issue. I tried several copy and export processes with the following results:
- When I try copying just a single appointment to e.g. a calendar folder in a separate PST, using the top menu Move / Copy function, I get a message saying:
"As the meeting organizer you do not have to respond to the meeting"
and nothing gets copied.
- I ran a test export for everything scheduled to start in Jan 2020, per the following sequence:
company_calendar_export_test_screen.docx
I have a client who is merging with a larger firm. My client is operating across a mixed environment with both an Exchange 2003 and an Exchange 2010 server. They have been using a Company Calendar public folder created on the Exchange 2003 server for almost 20 years, which contains all appointments for their legal staff for the many cases they've worked on. There are appointments in the Company Calendar that go back to 2007 and extend up to 2020, so all calendared events from c. 2012 and forward needs to be brought over to the new firm, which is running on Exchange 2013 servers. There are a total of c. 277,000 items in the Company Calendar, so figure c. 50-60% of that needs to be migrated over, based on the desired date range. As mentioned the folder is homed on the Exchange 2003 server, but I have replicated the folder to the Exchange 2010 server for data redundancy purposes, plus any operations to export the folder will be easier when working off the Exchange 2010 server. I need to figure out some way to export the Company Calendar items so the new firm can import those appointments in their present form to the Exchange 2013 server. A few notes on the migration project in general:
- The 2 firms are in different cities.
- There is no VPN between the offices.
- The new firm does not want to deal with any of the existing infrastructure of my client's firm, so they don't want e.g. to use a virtual server replica of one of our AD servers in order to set up a domain trust between my client's system and theirs for the sake of recognizing SID's, directory rights for exported file & folder structures, etc.
- I assume the only way to get the data to them is via some Copy or Export process to a separate PST.
There are several Owners in the Permissions list for the Company Calendar public folder, one of which is the (domain) Administrator user. I logged into a PC as the domain administrator and launched Outlook 2010. I set it up in cached mode. I added the Company Calendar to the Public Folder Favorites, and set up the Outlook account settings to download Public Folder Favorites to help with performance when accessing the Company Calendar data.
I can access all data / events / appointments in the Company Calendar without issue. I tried several copy and export processes with the following results:
- When I try copying just a single appointment to e.g. a calendar folder in a separate PST, using the top menu Move / Copy function, I get a message saying:
"As the meeting organizer you do not have to respond to the meeting"
and nothing gets copied.
- I ran a test export for everything scheduled to start in Jan 2020, per the following sequence:
company_calendar_export_test_screen.docx
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ASKER
Amit,
I did contact Microsoft, as there was no time to pursue other options.
Since there is no way in this time frame to arrange any type of domain trust between the 2 networks, and certainly no way to arrange a VPN for some type of line-of-sight between the 2 systems, the only immediately feasible way to do this is to use MFCMAPI and access the raw Exchange database. I've actually used this a few years ago to rebuild a public calendar. The method is a brute-force copy method - open both the public calendar and a local PST file, and copy and paste blocks of the public calendar record to the PST. Then send the PST to the target system and use the same technique in reverse to copy and paste the records into a new / blank public calendar. Not high-tech by any means, and it will require hours of the copy and paste operations, but it will work. Thanks for your input.
I did contact Microsoft, as there was no time to pursue other options.
Since there is no way in this time frame to arrange any type of domain trust between the 2 networks, and certainly no way to arrange a VPN for some type of line-of-sight between the 2 systems, the only immediately feasible way to do this is to use MFCMAPI and access the raw Exchange database. I've actually used this a few years ago to rebuild a public calendar. The method is a brute-force copy method - open both the public calendar and a local PST file, and copy and paste blocks of the public calendar record to the PST. Then send the PST to the target system and use the same technique in reverse to copy and paste the records into a new / blank public calendar. Not high-tech by any means, and it will require hours of the copy and paste operations, but it will work. Thanks for your input.
ASKER
There are definitely more considerations on transferring this data than I'm aware of. I would appreciate any and all suggestions on this, particularly if you've had to perform this type of migration previously. Thanks in advance for your assistance.