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PST Enterprise

Is PST Capture powerful enough for your migration needs?

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You only care about PST files if you have users that need to, or want to, access them.   Yes, Exchange 2010 introduced the Archive Mailbox and eliminated PST files, but you need to ingest PST files into that archive mailbox if users want to access them.   And getting to them from Office is nearly impossible – not only do they need to be moved off of users’ desktops, they need to be migrated to the Microsoft cloud, which can be a lengthy process.   Microsoft’s services still require a lot of IT involvement and don’t cover the many exception cases for which PST files are famous.  If you need to access PST files from Office 365, it can be much better to move them to a compatible archive.

Barracuda PST Enterprise offers complete PST management for your organization:

  • Regain control over email data stored within PST files scattered across their organization.
  • Eliminate the risks associated with PST files
  • Reduce ongoing costs and support IT requirements for Compliance and eDiscovery.

PST Enterprise will discover PST files on network servers and end user systems, and migrate this data to a secure location such as Exchange, Office 365 or Barracuda Message Archiver (BMA).  PST Enterprise for Message Archiver is an advanced feature of the BMA that gives administrators the flexibility to systematically discover PST files throughout their organization and automatically determine and assign PST ownership even if the PST is password protected.  Learn more about this feature here.

Microsoft’s PST Capture is free, and they offer a free upload service for PST files from a CD, so PST migration is covered – right?Click To Tweet

To read more of our blogs on PST migration, visit our archives here.

Rich Turner

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.

If you'd like to get in touch with Rich, you can connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

You can email Rich at rturner@barracuda.com.

Office 365 Import Service Limitations: Navigating Roadbumps

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Microsoft recently announced that their Office 365 Import Service is now available to all customers as a preview. In my previous blog, I looked into what they are actually providing and what this means for customers, and concluded that whilst it is a useful tool, it is not a complete solution for resolving the problems of PST files.

In this second look at the topic, I am following up with a deeper look at some of the areas the Office 365 Import Service doesn’t cover. We often talk about the three steps of a PST management project being locating, migrating and eliminating PST files so I’ll follow that approach.

[Read more…] about Office 365 Import Service Limitations: Navigating Roadbumps

Peter Mullens

Office 365 Import Service – The What, Why and How …

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Last week my colleague Andrew Brown wrote in this blog about Microsoft’s recent announcement about their Office 365 Import Service. This is now available as a preview. It is an interesting development by Microsoft, so I’m going to take a look into what they are actually providing, and what this means for Office 365 customers.

[Read more…] about Office 365 Import Service – The What, Why and How …

Peter Mullens

Office 365 Import Service – Bridging the Gap

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Microsoft’s recent announcements about the improved Office 365 Import Service and Auto Scaling, Highly Scalable Archives are great news for those companies moving to Office 365 and looking to remove local copies of PST files. It also clearly shows that Microsoft understands the scale and scope that legacy data presents to companies. However, I do question if it goes far enough?

[Read more…] about Office 365 Import Service – Bridging the Gap

Andrew Brown

The seven perils of PSTs [infographic]

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We've talked quite a bit about the problems with PST files.  These PSTs, or Personal Folders files, are Outlook data files that store messages and other items on a computer.  This is the most common method by which home users and small organizations archive and manage their Outlook information.

Because PSTs are so common, many SME and enterprise users find PST files to be a convenient way to manage their company mailboxes, even if PSTs aren't supported by the organization.  PST archives are easy to configure, easy to save, and easy to access.  This is a dream come true for users who don't understand the risks.

[Read more…] about The seven perils of PSTs [infographic]

Christine Barry

Christine Barry is Senior Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager at Barracuda.  In this role, she helps bring Barracuda stories to life and facilitate communication between the public and Barracuda internal teams.  Prior to joining Barracuda, Christine was a field engineer and project manager for K12 and SMB clients for over 15 years.  She holds several technology credentials, a Bachelor of Arts, and a Master of Business Administration.  She is a graduate of the University of Michigan.

Connect with Christine on Twitter or LinkedIn.

https://blog.barracuda.com

Zombie Data … Draining life byte by byte

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Scaring horror fans since the days of black and white, zombie movies have captivated audiences for years and we’re constantly bombarded with new movies, shows and video games featuring them.  Whether you are a fan of this genre or not, the talk of the living dead has now spilled over into the tech world.

zombie data 1

Your organization might have disaster recovery and a secure technical environment that’s protected against a zombie apocalypse, but is the threat already lurking hidden in your system?  We don’t wish to alarm you but zombie data is real and chances are it’s taking up valuable resources and posing risks in your environment even as you read this post…

[Read more…] about Zombie Data … Draining life byte by byte

Rich Turner

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.

If you'd like to get in touch with Rich, you can connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

You can email Rich at rturner@barracuda.com.

PST Capture, Why Unsupported Software is a Risk

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With Exchange 2010 Microsoft introduced a Personal Archives capability to Exchange mailboxes, which along with the much larger mailboxes eliminated the need for creating new PSTs. It was a while after the release of Exchange 2010 – in fact not until 2012, that Microsoft provided PST Capture, a free tool, to help organizations find, migrate and eliminate PSTs that exist throughout their networks and on end-user PCs.

Since it is provided at no cost, many try to leverage PST Capture and divert the funds they might spend for a third party tool to other aspects of their migration.

Is this a short-sighted decision?   Let’s look at the support aspect to answer that question.

[Read more…] about PST Capture, Why Unsupported Software is a Risk

Ken Hughes

Three Things PST Capture Doesn’t Do

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3 Things PST Capture Doesn't DoCustomers often ask us why they should pay money for a PST migration solution (such as our own PST Enterprise), when Microsoft provide their free PST Capture tool which appears to do the same job.

PST Capture is a competent product as far as it goes, but as you’d expect with something that is free, it does come with a number of limitations and other issues.  For small organizations these issues may not be important, but for larger enterprises they can cause significant problems.  Here are three of them.

 

PST Capture doesn't process files that are open in OutlookIt doesn’t process files that are open in Outlook 

If a user has a PST file open within Outlook (which will happen quite frequently) then PST Capture isn’t able to read or process that file as it requires exclusive access to each PST file.  The only way round this is to request each user to closes all of their PST files before processing.  This is of course a time‑consuming task and will inconvenience your users as they lose access to their data until the migration has completed.

PST Capture doesn't assign ownershipIt doesn’t automatically assign ownership

PST files are often discovered on network drives and other locations, and it may not be immediately apparent who they belong to or what they contain.  If a file does not have a current owner then if you are using PST Capture you will have to manually identify and assign one before that file can be processed.  In contrast, more sophisticated products such as C2C’s PST Enterprise are able to intelligently scan the contents of each PST file and assign onwership automatically.

PST Capture doesn't finish the jobIt doesn’t finish the job

After you have located and migrated all that PST data, you probably want to finish the job by deleting the original files. As well as reclaiming storage space, it will avoid confusing end users.  PST Capture doesn’t delete files after processing, so you are left with the time-consuming manual task of finding and dealing with them.  Of course the more advanced PST migration solutions will delete these files automatically for you.

Choose your solution wisely

To summarise, Microsoft’s free PST Capture tool definitely does have a role.  It is well-documented and does the job, but it has a number of limitations which can make it very time-consuming and inefficient to use.  Organizations planning large-scale PST migrations should choose a more advanced solution that can automate most aspects of the migration process and that is more efficient at locating, migrating and eliminating their PST files.

Ensure you have included the cost of PST migration software in your budget, because the alternative – asking your IT Professionals to undertake lengthy manual tasks – is a far more expensive route to take.

Peter Mullens

For Your Eyes Only … A License to Kill PST Files

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License to Kill Mission BriefFor Your Eyes Only …

C2C are pleased to announce we are offering a free Quickstart version of PST Enterprise, our award-winning solution that allows you to automatically locate, migrate and eliminate PST files.

PST Enterprise, which was recently recognized with an MSExchange.org Gold Award scoring 4.8 out of 5 addresses many of the limitations of free PST management tools such as Microsoft's own PST Capture which isn't scalable, requires client software install, doesn't assign ownership or automatically delete PSTs after you have dealt with them. Check out the full feature comparison

“PST Enterprise is a product that should be top of your list for evaluation”
Steve Goodman, Exchange MVP

A View to a Kill …

“Every enterprise that has PST files experiences challenges with data loss, file corruption and ‘dark’ hidden data that may put the organization at risk during a compliance audit or litigation discovery event,” said Dave Hunt, CEO, C2C. “We want to help organizations avoid these challenges with a free version of our PST Enterprise solution that gives them a ‘license to kill’ those PST files.”


Licensed to Kill PST Files …

PST Enterprise allows Exchange administrators to systematically locate PST files across any organization without end user intervention.   It automatically determines and assigns an owner for each PST file, can copy or move the PST files to specified network locations or remove them using defensible deletion policies.  PST file data can also be ingested  directly into Exchange or Office 365.

The Quickstart version is valid for 120 days from install, supports up to 100 mailboxes and features a self-service support forum.

Dave Hunt

Don’t get throttled by Office 365

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Office 365 throttling

Adoption of Office 365 continues to grow, and Microsoft are always keen to talk about their success in selling it to well-known organizations such as British Airways, Toyota and Capgemini. We hear much less from Microsoft about how easy (or not) it is to migrate end users onto the Office 365 platform.

Migrating to Office 365 can be a complex project for all but the smallest of organizations, and it has created a healthy market for a wide range of third-party tools and solutions which to address the various aspects of migration. These include our own ‘PST Enterprise’ product which migrates PST files from end users systems and network drives into Office 365.

Speed limits ahead

The biggest obstacle faced by these solutions is that of performance.  Microsoft have imposed strict limits on the speed at which data can be migrated into Office 365, and all applications are ‘throttled’ to ensure that they stay within these limits.  Throttling is one of the means by which Microsoft manages the operation of Office 365 to ensure that all customers get a good service.  It has to ensure that each tenant behaves as a ‘good neighbor’ and does not impact others by using excessive bandwidth or resources.

It may be possible to negotiate with Microsoft on an individual basis to get some of the limits raised temporarily, but most customers will have to accept that speed of their migration may be less than they would like, and it could take them longer than they would expect to get all their users moved over.

Most solutions on the market migrate data from or via a central server using Office 365 admin accounts.  As throttling is enforced at an individual account level they use multiple admin accounts to circumvent this, however Office 365 also applies throttling at an overall level per tenant for admin accounts.  This limit cannot be worked around, so performance will still be capped.

Take a different route

A few solutions, such as our own PST Enterprise product, take a different approach and migrate data directly from each end user system straight into Office 365 rather than going via a central server.  They also access Office 365 using the end user account associated with each file, rather than using dedicated admin accounts.  This means that rather than running a small number of high-volume migrations, these solutions process a much larger number of smaller-volume individual migrations.

This parallel processing approach is much less susceptible to Office 365 throttling, and whilst their migration will still be a complex process it will be possible for organizations to complete it much more quickly and with less overall disruption to end users.

Peter Mullens