Moving Public folders from Exchange 2003 to 2010 SP3

I was on a job today and run into a familiar problem of trying to move public folders from an old Exchange 2003 server to the 2010 box I just built. Let me first establish my love hate relationship with Public folders, I hate them, with a passion as they cause me nothing but problems whenever I do a migration. The love side comes into effect when a customer says "we don't have or use Public folders"!!

On this particular occasion the customer was running Exchange 2003 which was proving to be a bit of a pain to migrate. The person who previously installed it  had added some strange permissions which were stopping me cold when trying to move mailboxes or get access to certain permissions. Anyway I managed to resolve most of those issues, and I’d got to the point where I needed to move the Public Folders. (PF)

The night before I set the replicas going and the next day arrived on site after moving half the mailboxes, only to be told that the users couldn't see any shared calendars, Great. If you ever run into this problem, here's a handy guide on how to fix it.

The first thing to do is to see if the replicas are working. The new 2010 server (pictured below)  has been added into the replica group but none of the users on the 2010 box can see any group calendars, so clearly something is wrong, let’s move over to the 2003 box to investigate.

First we need to check if the replicas are working on the 2003 box. Right click on the folder and then click on properties, on this occasion I get the old token invalid error which is to do with the virtual directory Exadmin being set to require SSL authentication. This would normally be needed for HTTPS external access but on this occasion the 2003 box is no longer being used for external web access so we can disable this feature. So how do we switch it off? Follow these simple steps.

Open up IIS on the 2003 box and right click on Exadmin and click on properties. Click on the directory security tab, next in secure communications.

Click on the edit button then un-tick the required secure channel button. If the option "requires 128-bit encryption" is ticked you must un-tick it BEFORE you click apply, if you don’t, it will still be in operation and you will get the same token invalid error.

Now when you try and open the folder you will have access, but notice that my new server is not in the list so let’s add it.

When you add the exchange 2010 database, it will appear as the database name.

On the Exchange 2010 server, the PF description should be the same as the 2003 version.

Open up the PF MMC using the toolbox in Exchange 2010, and right click on PF and click on the update Hierarchy option.

Right click on PF again and this time click on refresh.

If you want the replication to occur right away, right click on each of the folders and click on the update content option

Replication should begin straight away but may take some time depending on the size of the PF content.

And that’s it, your folders should now be on your Exchange 2010 server.