Primary mailbox on Exchange 2007, personal archive on Exchange 2010 - Is it possible?

Question

I'm designing a migration from PST's to the Personal Archive on Exchange 2010. The current setup is using Exchange 2007 + Outlook 2007.

One of the possible migrations paths I'm thinking is to move all the PST from a single user to a new Exchange 2007 mailbox for that user. The idea is more or less that each user will have a personal mailbox and a shared mailbox for the archive (the only user accessing this shared mailbox is the owner of the data, of course). The end result is that the user has two mailboxes, the primary and the exclusive shared mailbox, both in Exchange 2007. The I will upgrade my server and client infrastructure to Exchange 2010 + Outlook 2010.

Next, I would like to move the data on the exclusive shared mailbox in Exchange 2007 to the true personal archive for that user.

Can I move data from a mailbox/shared mailbox to the personal archive of another mailbox? A workaround will be to move data from the shared mailbox to a temporary PST and then to the personal archive, but it would easier to move it directly.

Answer 1

This behavior changed with Exchange 2010 SP1. You can now place the Archived mailbox on a different database, server, or even in the cloud.

Ed Mckinzie

Answer 2

It sounds like a high-maintenance setup, but moving the items between mailboxes shouldn't be a problem.

Answer 3

This is not possible using Exchange 2010's Online Archive feature, because a users primary mailbox and archive must reside within the same mail store.

You can setup a hokey version by just creating a users secondary mailbox and configuring some rules on their primary mailbox to shuffle mail over there. But it's not a solid solution and you barely get any of the benefits of online archive.

Answer 4

I've come to the conclusion that mailbox and archive must reside both in Exchange 2010 servers. The only way I can think of to convince Exchange to do that is to manually edit the AD attribute relative to mailbox and archive database and place them were I want, and this is not recommended because you're leaving out the Exchange validations that you get thanks to the powershell cmdlets.
In the end, even if it were feasible to have the primary mailbox in Exchange 2007 and the archive in Exchange 2010 it would be far, far away of current best practices and prone to headaches.