How to migrate public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups in Exchange Online

Public folders are intended for shared access, offering a simple and efficient method for collecting, organizing, and distributing data within an organization. They help organize data in a hierarchical order. However, users don't prefer them for data archiving purposes as it affects storage in public folders. Additionally, public folders don't support document sharing and collaboration features.

Microsoft 365 Groups, on the other hand, enables you to select users you want to collaborate with and effortlessly set up a shared collection of resources for them. You don't need to manually assign permissions as adding members to the group automatically grants them the necessary permissions to access the group's tools and resources.

Evaluating the shift: Public folders vs Microsoft 365 groups

Migrating public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups

Batch migration can be used when migrating your email and calendar content from your existing public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups. The steps for performing batch migration depends on the version of Exchange that currently hosts your public folder hierarchy.

Benefits of batch migration

• The migration process employs migration batch cmdlets, allowing migration to multiple groups in a single migration batch.
• The migrated emails and posts will appear as group conversations, while the migrated calendar items will be displayed in the group calendars.
• Batch migration allows you to move public folders to Microsoft 365 Groups without first transferring them to Microsoft 365 or Office 365. The MRS data copy cmdlets directly read the public folder data from the on-premises environment and copy it to Microsoft 365 Groups.
• You can select specific public folders to migrate.
• Batch migrations are intended to be a straightforward, one-time data transfer from source public folders to target groups.
• The migration combines public folder data with any existing content in the group.

How to perform batch migration: An overview

The following steps outline the batch migration process of transferring your public folder data to Microsoft 365 Groups.

1. Select the public folders that you want to migrate. These can be any folders that contain mail or calendar content.
2. Create corresponding groups for your folders.
3. Use the batch migration cmdlets to copy data from the folders to the Groups.
4. Lock the public folders once you have verified the data in the Groups.
5. Copy any new data that might have been created between steps 3 and 4 and follow the same process.

During steps 1 through 3, your public folders and their corresponding groups will remain accessible to users. After step 3, you can assess whether to continue with the migration based on the Groups experience. At this point, you can either roll back the migration and resume using public folders or proceed. If you continue and complete step 5, you can delete the original public folders. Even after migration, you can revert to public folders if you have saved your backup files and haven't deleted the originals.

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