When I heard of the
Microsoft PST Capture tool http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh781036(v=exchg.141).aspx
I thought how useful it would have been for a project I was doing a few years
ago. Around 3 years ago I was migrating to Exchange 2010 from Exchange 2003,
and the real difficulty was all of the mail data was stored locally as PST
files on all of the client workstations. The migration ended up being a very
long weekend of manually importing PST files into new Exchange mailboxes.
I am using a Windows 7 PC as
the PST Capture Workstation, if you are using Windows 7 you must install
PowerShell 3.0.
Download PST Capture http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36789
Download PowerShell 3.0 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=34595
A PST Capture Agent must be installed on any
devices that PST Capture is polling for rogue PST files. Luckily it is compiled
into an MSI file, therefore it can be deployed using a Software Installation
Group Policy Object if you do not have Configuration Manager in your
environment. When installing the agent you must point to the PST Capture
Workstation.
Once the installation completes launch the PST
Capture Console and click on the New PST Search...
Select the Domain you want to search and
browse the Organisation Units (OU) for endpoint workstations. Clients
that do not have the PST Capture Agent installed will have a red
icon, if the agent is detected it will be green. Click Next.
On the next pane, select which locations on the
workstations you want to search for PST's, I personally left it to All (Not
including network or external drives). Click Next.
Select No Schedule (Run Manually) and
click Next.
PST Capture will browse through the workstations and find any
PST files.
On my test PC it found a number of PST's. I
selected one of them, and click on the New Import List.... and from the
drop down click On Premise.
From the Destination Mailbox section,
click and select the target mailbox you want the PST imported into, click Import
All Now.
The PST Capture Console will be importing
the PST file into the Exchange mailbox.
