This is Part 6 in a series of posts about my experience tackling the migration of PST files.
The first post in the series is here.
The next post in the series is here.
When the Exchange Team at Microsoft posted about PST capture in July of 2011, I was very excited. That post was really the catalyst that got us started thinking we could really Import PSTs. We started putting our infrastructure together to handle all the PSTs floating out in the wild. The future look bright.
And we waited...
During our waiting period we had our own crisis or two that propelled us into the PST import business. By the time PST Capture was officially out in Jan of 2012, we were already fully functional with our scripts and we saw no compelling reason to change.
Still I saw value. We have many users in the field that don't have Home Shares at Headquarters and they were saving their PST files locally. We needed to get those PST as well, eventually. So I downloaded the PST Capture tool and did some testing.
I was sad to find out that to do discovery on a PC, you had to have an agent installed. We still have that same issue with delivering an EXE to all the PC's in the world. So that was out. I tried it on a few PCs, thinking we could do this from time to time. But I could not get it to work. I didn't go deep into troubleshooting, and just thought it was a firewall issue. That would be a nightmare to get open!
But I did try using the UNC file path and that was working. Until I found out that this did not work on some clients. Seems like it failed on all the clients we needed it to work on. Like Office 2007.
There is no reporting feature with PST Capture, true we could still use the same reports we use now, but we would lose a few statistics, like how many files were processed and skipped.
We stopped testing.
So if you're wondering why we went to all the trouble to write this family of scripts to import PSTs, instead of using PST Capture, now you know the rest of the story.
Introduction: The Beginings
Part 1: Script Requirements
Part 2: Add-PSTImportQueue
Part 3: Process-PSTImportQueue
Part 4: Some Tools we added
Part 5: Set-PSTImportQueue
Part 6: About PST Capture
Part 7: More PST Import Tools
Part 8: Using RoboCopy
Part 9: Morning Status Report
Part 10: Using BITS Transfer
Part 11: Get the script / Set up
Part 12: The Functions
