Tag Archives: BPOS

Microsoft PST Capture Tool – what you need to know

There’s a lot of buzz today heralding the arrival of the PST Capture Tool from Microsoft which allows you to locate PST files on your network and import them to an on-premise Exchange Server, or Exchange Online as part of BPOS or Office 365.

While this tool is great people need to understand that this will require some manual work to be done initially – it won’t simply install on a PC and then use native WMI to seek out rogue PST files sitting on users computers. Firstly you need to install a central console, and then an agent on each PC.
The central console will then speak to the agents, find the PST files and place them in a central location – thereby allowing you to import them into Exchange Server or Exchange Online.

This tool requires two key things to work:
- Active Directory
- Outlook 64-bit

So there may be a few small scenarios where this tool can’t be used, such as a customer that has no Active Directory (eg. SMBs with no server infrastructure, organisations with a different identity management system) or more commonly where all PCs run 32-bit operating systems.

For those few scenarios you might find that the MessageOps Office 365 Exchange Migrator (currently in beta) might be a better fit.

Is Office 365 offline for you? Now you’ll know!

Many times in the past two years since I started helping customers get into the cloud with Microsoft Office 365 (and BPOS before that) one of the challenges whenever there was any impact to the service was knowing if it affected you specifically. It wasn’t uncommon to get a call from a customer or even one of my own team who said they couldn’t get into their email – but it worked fine for others.
Because public cloud services are so large – it may not always impact every customer or even user the same way. While one customer may have issues – others could be completely fine.
It can go so granular to the point where not every users mailbox is even sitting on the same server.

My latest piece in BoxFreeIT talks about the recent improvement to the Office 365 Service Health dashboard which helps you identify if there is any impact to YOUR Office 365 environment.

What’s coming in the next version of BPOS

A blog post from the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/2010/07/12/next-generation-bpos.aspx
Some of the exciting features are:

  • Office Web Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote)
  • Exchange 2010 features (unified messaging, archiving, retention policies, transport rules, multi-mailbox search, free/busy between cloud & on-prem, native migration tools, remote PowerShell, etc.)
  • SharePoint 2010 features (portal site templates, extranet & anonymous access, Office 2010 integration, tagging and social networking, better search, improved features & functionality, Visio & Excel Services, sandboxed solutions, improved workflows, SharePoint Designer 2010 access, better control of FQDNs, etc.)
  • OCS 2010 features (P2P audio/video & file transfer across firewalls, presence with pictures, federation, IM with Windows Live)
  • General updates (single sign-on, identity federation, redesigned admin interface, more administration and access control)

Migrating a WSS 2.0/3.0 site to SharePoint Online

So you have a customer with a Small Business Server 2003 environment that has set up and used Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 or 3.0 and wants to retain the data when they move to BPOS.
As SharePoint Online (like many other hosted SharePoint offerings) doesn’t provide you with command line access to run stsadm.exe, what can you do?
The simple answer (in the case of WSS 3.0) would be to use SharePoint Designer (SPD) 2007 to simply backup and restore the site. While this sounds good in theory SPD has a very well known bug that prevents it from exporting more than 25MB (if your site is more than 25MB).
You could also use SPD to export & import the parts of the site you want using Personal Web Packages, but this can be time consuming depending on how many lists & libraries you have.
Or you could spend a small fortune on migration tools in the market like Metalogix or MetaVis, however I’d prefer a method the customer can afford.

So please join me on this journey of migrating a WSS 2.0 or 3.0 site to SharePoint Online. The WSS 3.0-specific instructions begin at Step 5.
(note: while this has been reproduced several times in various production environments, it is not perfect and can be thrown off by data corruption or issues with the environments)

Step 1 – Perform a backup of the existing site in WSS 2.0 using command line
stsadm -o backup -url http://(sitename) -filename c:temp(filename).dat

Step 2 – Set up a WSS 2.0 environment and copy across the newly created backup
I’d recommend either Microsoft Virtual PC or VMWare Workstation for ease of use. Also make sure that your new WSS 2.0 installation matches the source server version. This page will help you determine what service pack level to install.

Step 3 – Restore the WSS 2.0 backup to your new environment
Ensure that you’ve created a blank site in IIS and created this as a web application in SharePoint Central Admin. The run the following command:
stsadm -o restore -url http://(sitename) -filename c:temp(filename).dat -overwite

Step 4 – Perform an in-place upgrade of WSS 2.0 to 3.0
After installing WSS 3.0 SP2 make sure you run the configuration wizard. Once the databases have completed the upgrade process make sure you go into SharePoint Central Admin and select ‘Finalize Upgrade’ under the Operations tab. When all is done load your site and ensure that it appears the way it should (with all content intact).

Step 5 (or Step 1 for you people who are not doing the WSS 2.0 part) – Export the site to Content Migration Package (CMP) files
stsadm -o export -url http://(sitename) -filename c:temp(filename).cmp -includeusersecurity -versions 4
(the additional switches will ensure that the metadata comes across as well as all of the version history)

Step 6 – Import the site to SharePoint Online
Once all of the CMP files have been exported you will now need to import them using SharePoint Designer. Simply connect to SharePoint Online from within SPD and click on Site -> Administration -> Restore Web Site, point to the first CMP file created and go find something to keep you busy.
Something important to note with this step – SPD will upload the CMP files to the SharePoint Online site first, then extract them. Make sure the site collection is big enough to handle twice your current site size as it will be storing both the CMP files and the extracted content at the same time.

Once the restore has completed, log in and make sure the destination looks like the source and contains the same content.
Some points of note:
- If the same usernames existing in the customers BPOS profile as in the on-premise SharePoint environment – you will find the created/modifed by fields will retain the original names
- The Last Modified field of all of the lists and libraries will be counted from the time they were created in SharePoint Online

I hope this all makes sense, and if you need any help or have feedback – please don’t hesitate to ask us!

Service descriptions for Microsoft Online Services (standard)

Microsoft last week released updated service descriptions for Microsoft Online Services which consolidate all of the relevant information into a few easy downloads. You can get access to these documents here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c60c0af0-10cc-4b11-bcef-b989c1f168b0
BPOS service descriptions