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I have Exchange 2010 and am moving my 2003 mailboxes to it. The mailboxes become inaccessible during the move. Is there a way to make it so the user can continue using their email from Outlook (2007+) while the mailbox is being moved?

Can you access a mailbox during a mailbox move from 2003 to 2010?

I do not know if this is accurate. Any workarounds? Some of my folks have very large mailboxes and will be out for a while, which is bad.

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    You're asking if 10-year-old technology has improved in the last two years. No, it hasn't. Exchange 2010 and maybe 2007 will let you do online moves, if the source and destination are new enough to allow it. Not the situation you're in. New features come with the new versions, you'll rarely see them backported to the old versions.
    – mfinni
    Jul 29, 2013 at 19:43
  • Is your issue that you're worried about the user not being able to access their mailbox, or that the e-mail may not arrive at it's destination when the mailbox is offline?
    – DKNUCKLES
    Jul 29, 2013 at 19:46
  • @DKNUCKLES Can't use the mailbox. The moves are extremely slow.
    – johnny
    Jul 29, 2013 at 19:58
  • If moves are extremely slow then you should address that problem. How big are your mailboxes?
    – longneck
    Jul 29, 2013 at 21:05

2 Answers 2

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Using the standard move functions, no, there is no way to do this without taking the mailbox offline.

There are some more creative things you could do like export to a PST, but anything like that is going to be very time intensive and require a lot of manual work on your part. And ultimately result in a less consistent move experience for your users than kicking them out of their mailbox for a few hours overnight.

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  • The way I'm doing it now takes days to move some mailboxes.
    – johnny
    Jul 29, 2013 at 19:59
  • @Johnny Why does the move take so long? Is it worth trying to reduce the time? Even a large mailbox going to Exchange Online over the Interweb is reasonably quick in our environment.
    – john
    Jul 29, 2013 at 20:16
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If it were me, I would be looking at ways to make the move requests complete more quickly. What is causing the bottlenecks, server performance, a slow WAN link? If you could provide more details about your environment, perhaps the community could help you locate the source of the problem.

I understand that the mailbox is taken offline when migrating from 2003 to 2010. If your slow migrations are due to a slow link, then maybe the solution is to move or create a 2010 box as near to your source server as possible to eradicate the bottleneck. It would be a two-stage migration, much like is done with an Exchange Online Hybrid deployment. All of our legacy mailboxes were migrated to a local Exchange 2010 server before being moved to the cloud.

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  • I know it isn't the network. Server is brand new. I don't know any physical reason. Just slow.
    – johnny
    Jul 30, 2013 at 17:18
  • @Johnny Both servers are brand new? Not sure I can help you, but with reasonable amount of info, you would do well to ask another question. I'd welcome reading the responses, at least. There's also this I case you hadn't found it already: social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/…
    – john
    Jul 30, 2013 at 17:46

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