Mailbox Migration: What have you done for me lately?

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Hi again! We talked briefly before about what was new with directory migration, but you may well ask what have you done for me lately? Well I’ll tell you. Directory migration wasn’t the only place we made improvements, mail migration also got some love.  

  1.  Performance! We’ve improved performance for mail migration in a couple of ways. First of all, whereas we used to write everything to disk and then read everything from disk between extraction and injection. Now everything is passed from the extractor to the injector in memory, so you no longer have to take the disk I/O hit in migration. Secondly, we’ve implemented multi-threaded mailbox migration, which makes us much faster than before.
  2. Merge Mode! Let’s say you’re migrating a 2GB mailbox, and somewhere in the middle, you lose network connectivity. In the past, if you re-migrated the whole mailbox, you’d get duplicates of any messages that had already come over. You could limit the re-migration down to a specific date range to overcome this, but that solution is a little cumbersome. In the new world order, we have merge mode! Now when you re-migrate the mailbox, we’ll detect which messages are already there and not re-inject them.
  3.  No More SC2! We now have better calendar content fidelity in migration, which is possible because we now inject calendar content directly into the target mailbox instead of sending it through an SC2 file along the way.
  4.  Web Services! Our mail injector now populates the target mailbox through Exchange 2007 Web Services. We used to inject using MAPI, which meant that the ports that you needed to have open between the migration client and the target server were all of the MAPI RPC ports. Web Services uses HTTPS, which means that 443 is what you need to have open between you and Exchange for mail injection.
  5. PowerShell! Like the rest of our tools, all of this glorious functionality is exposed through PowerShell tasks, which infuses you with Fabulous Scripting Powers (fabulous scripts to follow)!

--Jenna