Office365 Exchange Online PST Import Service - It's EASY.

hi guys mack here again so today quite a quick video a friend of mine recently joined the week was having some problems trying to import some relatively large pst files into office 365. now it turns out he wasn't aware there is an import process so i've taken it through the process and it's really quick really clean and i thought i'd take you through it as well so what we're looking at here is a brand new office 365 tenancy if we pop into our admin there if we have a look at our users you should see it's a clean tenancy with office 365 e5 licenses what i also have here are a set of pst files in fact they're all a copy of the same pst file just for the purposes of this demo they're all about six gig in size now what we want to do is get all of these pst's imported into all of these users now like i say there is a real simple way of doing this and i'm going to take you through that process now there is a pre-rack that we need to meet in terms of permissions and let me show you what i mean what i'm going to do is just jump into the protection portal which is protectionoffice.com what we're interested in here is the information governance and in there you'll see that there's an import option if we click the import option what we want to be able to do is import pst files now what you'll see by default is we'll get an error here saying to create jobs you must be assigned the mailbox import export role in exchange online also it will tell you that it can take up to 24 hours before that roll actually gets assigned which can be very annoying it doesn't typically take a day to do but it can take several hours so let's go and sort that part and then what we'll do is we'll come back to this once that roll is actually assigned now it is pretty easy to do so back from our admin what we're going to do is pop into our exchange on line admin console there it is and what we're going to do is go into the admin roles now there are several ways of doing this you can either add it to an existing role or what we're going to do is create a new one i'm just going to call it mailbox import now in terms of the role if you get a list of the roles and move down there you should see that there's an option there for mailbox import export so we're going to add that and in terms of users or members of this role i'm just going to add my admin account there so we'll click save let this run like i say it can take a little while to apply so what i'm going to do is leave this now and we'll come back to it once this is applied and i'll take you through the rest of the process okay so i ended up leaving this overnight so i'm not quite sure exactly how long it took but let's get in and we'll just make sure that that error message has gone so i'm just going to open up the admin panel we can see the users that we want to import they're all the users here there are our pst files up on the right hand side there so where we want to go we want to go into the protection portal which is protection.office.com and we're going to set up a new import job so we want to go down to information governance on the left and we're going to go to import now as you can see we're no longer getting that error message about the role so obviously that role has applied and we are good to go so let's go through the process because it is actually really straightforward so i'm going to click on that option there which is import pst files and i am going to create a new import job now if you have already run several other import jobs you'll see them all listed here this is a fresh empty tenancy so i'm just going to go with a brand new import job i'm going to call it import demo and it will walk you through the process to achieve what we want to do so i'm going to say i want to upload my data because that's what i'm going to do i'm going to upload these pst files and leave azure and microsoft to get on with the ingestion into those mailboxes now this bit can get a little bit tricky it looks harder than it actually is what we're going to do is we are going to get a path to an azure upload location you see that link there show network upload click that it can take a few minutes to get the key there we go you can see that url there so i'm just going to copy to the clipboard there by clicking that button now i have the command already in my notepad here we're going to use this to use a az copy to copy our pst files up to azure if you look in the description there is a link to my blog which has all these commands in i'll also link to the main articles that explains how this process works but what i'm going to do we'll have a look at the command here it's a z copy that's the source of where the pst files are which you can see up there on the right hand side and in the destination there we want to put this url that we've just created so i'm just going to paste it in there a couple of things in here you can see that i've got a log set up make sure the log goes somewhere where it's writable because if it isn't it'll fail and there's a couple other switches on here that seem to make the process a little bit more reliable but like i say go to my main blog on this process and i'll have a bit more information on what all these switches mean so i'm just going to copy that there now before we can use a z copy we need to get it installed so it does give you the option to download azure az copy here now i've already got it installed if you haven't just go and get the download and get it installed so what i'm going to do now is just fire up a dos prompt now we need to find where this as your copy command is now the simplest way to do that is just do a dir forward slash so we'll go off and find it for us so you can see that's where it is so i'm just going to copy that path and pop into there now you remember that command we did earlier this one we need to now run this so i'm going to copy it and just paste it into the command bar here now what's happening is the unit has gone off and it's copying up all of those psts to office 365. we have a look at our task manager here you can see the ethernet is showing the upload so we're getting a pretty good upload speed of about 500 megabytes per second so let's let this finish and we'll come back to it when it's done okay so that copy operation is now completed so we can close all that down now so if we get back to the portal here it tells you what the process is so we've now completed the copy so we can click i've done uploading my file the other thing to consider is this element here i have access to the mapping file i'm going to click yes and i'm going to show you the mapping file so on my desktop i have this file here and it is a small csv and what it does is it maps the psts that we've just imported to the accounts that we're going to import them to now again on the main blog article i'll leave a download link to this template so if you want to go and take it so you can see we've got the work loader specified there we've got the pst files specified and i've just noticed some mistakes so let me quickly update those there we go i forgot the extensions on the end so you can see we've got all the pst files and we've also got the target mailboxes that we want these pst's to be imported into you will also see this column here is it an archive now i'm going to say false in those i've seen a lot of references that say you can just leave that blank but for some reason i never seem to have any luck with that so i tend to set it to false now of course if you do want to import into the archive and set that to true the next thing you want to make sure is in there is just the path that you want the mail imported into just having the forward slash there just puts it in the root now once you have this file make sure it's saved as a csv because you're going to need it in a moment i have access to the mapping file selected so we're going to click next so we're going to select that mapping file that we've just edited there we go i'm also going to validate it as well and it will now go and check the contents of that file to make sure it has the right information in so you can see that this has validated okay so i'm going to click save so you can see now that we have successfully added the import job and that office 365 will notify us when it is ready to be actually imported into the office 365 tenancy so i'm just going to click close now you can see the job there it is showing analysis in progress it can take a little while this piece depending on how many mailboxes and the size of the pst files that you're trying to import so i'm going to leave this running now and we'll come back to it hopefully when the analysis piece has completed so that took about an hour for that analysis to complete just on those pst files that we are importing you can see now that there is an option that says ready to import to office 365 so i'm going to click on that now in this wizard you can see all of the psts that we've uploaded and at the top there there is a button that says import to office 365. so this is where the magic bit happens so let's click on that now we do have the option here to filter the data before importing it to 365. so if your psts go back over several years you could say for example i only want to import say the last 12 months of data i'm not going to do that i'm going to import absolutely everything into the mailboxes just so we can see the way it works for the purposes of this demo so i'm going to select that and click next you can see now that it's saying that there's going to be about 31 gigabytes of data imported and i'm going to say yes get on with it there we go so we've now kicked off the last piece of the job which is to actually import the stuff from azure direct into our mailboxes within office 365. you can see there that progress will be shown i do find that that doesn't tend to update by the way you can often see that it looks like it's doing nothing and then all of a sudden it'll be at 100 for the mailboxes so don't get too concerned about that i'm going to click close so what we'll do is we'll leave this running and we'll come back to when the import is finished and we'll see what the final state of those mailboxes actually is okay so we're back in the portal again now i left this running overnight and unfortunately there was an office 365 and azure authentication failure last night which caused us a few issues with the demo but as you can see here the job has completed if we have a look at it there we go you can see all the imports have run there it's they're all the same pst so they should all be the same now of course what we can do is we can log on to an individual user and you will see that all of that mail is there and it's in the same location that those pst files have the mail as well so as you can see it is a real simple way to get large psts imported in bulk into office 365. i'm surprised more people don't make use of it i mean over the years i've used it for all kinds of things even like cut over migrations and all that sort of stuff and i have found it ruthlessly reliable and the performance is not too bad at all any questions drop them in the comments below i'll try and answer them for you i will also put a link down to the main blog article that has all those commands and also a link to the proper website in the proper description about what this service is capable of

Channel: MacDoesStuff

Views: 17,453

Keywords: Office365, PST Import, Importing PST, Office365 PST Import Service, pst to office 365, import pst to office 365, upload pst to office 365, pst to office 365 migration, exchange online, network upload method, cloud migration, office 365 mailbox, how to import mail office 365, office 365 tutorial for beginners, office 365, import pst to office 365 outlook, kernel import pst to office 365, how to import pst file into office 365 webmail

Id: _QqrhZOFryY

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020