Outlook Personal Folders (PST files) have been a management challenge for both small and enterprise companies for a number of years. With the industry and business culture shift toward eliminating PST files, companies are faced with the burden of moving this data in a timely, secure and cost-effective manner. This case study outlines one of our many successful PST migration projects.

1. Mail Attender Education
Case Study: A PST Migration Story
www.SherpaSoftware.com
1.800.255.5155 | @sherpasoftware
information@sherpasoftware.com

2. Case Study:
A PST Migration Story
Outlook Personal Folders (PST files) have been a management challenge for both small and enterprise
companies for a number of years. With the industry and business culture shift toward eliminating PST
files, companies are faced with the burden of moving this data in a timely, secure and cost-effective
manner. Sherpa Software is a trusted advisor and solution provider that helps companies through their
PST migration process. Our experience in planning, implementing and executing the migration process
has proven successful in addressing challenges these companies face. This case study outlines one of
our many successful PST migration projects.
First Contact
A healthcare manufacturing organization contacted Sherpa requesting help in accomplishing their data
migration objective: to migrate a vast amount of PST data into a centralized data store. Sherpa’s Mail
Attender solution has the capability to migrate PST data to target stores that could include mailboxes,
online archives, Office 365 mailboxes or Office 365 archives as well as other custom targets. This
healthcare manufacturing company had 6,000 employees and 50,000 PST files with 150TB of data
spread across three sites.
When the organization first contacted Sherpa, one of their main challenges was that they had no idea of
the number of PST files in their environment, nor did they know where these PSTs were located. They
could only tell that the PST files might reside on desktops, laptops or network shares. The company was
looking for a solution that could do the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Inventory their PST files, regardless of location
Analyze how much data needed to be ingested
Determine how long the ingestion process would take
Automate the ingestion process
Ensure that data was migrated into the correct user’s online archive
Filter data to ingest only the last three years’ worth of email
Provide detailed audit reports
Sherpa’s Mail Attender product was the perfect fit, and the organization decided to move forward with the
evaluation process.
During the evaluation, the company used Mail Attender to run migration scenarios in a test environment.
They used sample PST files to run simulations of their project requirements. Testing was successful, and
planning was quickly underway for a full migration deployment.
Phase One: Planning and Production Testing
Once the organization verified the PST migration test data, key questions needed to be answered,
including how much data would be migrated, how long the project would take and how the deployment
would impact their infrastructure and end-users.
Collecting Information
As a first step, the organization began by deploying Mail Attender’s desktop agents using a login script.
This locally installed software allows the centralized Mail Attender console to “talk” with each desktop and
laptop in order to both identify and process the PSTs stored on end-user machines.
The company also initialized automated searches against their file shares to find any network-based PST
files. Between the network shares and desktop agents, Mail Attender discovered 50,000 PST files,
totaling 150 TB worth of data. This reflected an average of approximately eight PST files per user.
Sherpa Software
•
www.sherpasoftware.com
•
Page 2

3. Case Study:
A PST Migration Story
Pilot Testing
Parallel with the identification of the PST files, the company selected employees for production testing of
the migration. The information collected from these pilot users was helpful in determining the impact of
PST processing and benchmarks for expanded deployment, as well as identifying information required for
audits and any changes needed for the migration process. It was confirmed that the end-users saw little
to no impact during processing, and only a few tweaks were made to the ongoing process.
Thanks to the data collected during this test, it was determined that it would take less than 60 days to
process all 150 TB of data. The organization was thrilled as it would result in a quick ROI for the project.
Phase Two: Migration Preparation
Audit Reports
Once pilot testing was finalized, the company leveraged the reporting functionality of Mail Attender to
ensure the information required for auditing purposes was being captured. For each PST file that was
processed, the report included the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Name and location of the PST file
Name of the AD user who ‘owned’ the PST file
Total size (volume) of the data
Total number (count) of messages
Total size (volume) of the messages that were less than three years old
Total number (count) of messages that were less than three years old
This information benefited the organization in a number of ways. It provided a detailed background of the
data, which allowed the company to plan for growth of the destination data stores once the ingestion was
complete.
Additionally, these reports were used to help determine what data could not be processed. Any data
migration will include a minority of outlying data which cannot be processed; the reasons for this may
include corrupt files or an inability to access a PST file. Determining which items were unable to be
processed and why is essential for both auditing and troubleshooting purposes. To further identify these
items, Mail Attender was used to create post-processing reports for the destination data store, which
included:
•
•
•
The name of the AD user who ‘owned’ the data store
The total size of the folder where the PST data was ingested
The total number (count) of messages in the folder where the PST data was ingested
Through Mail Attender’s reporting details, it was discovered that a handful of users were on leave during
the information collection stage; because of this, the desktop agents were never installed on their
machines. Thanks to the various console views in Mail Attender, these users were easily identified,
which resulted in manually installing the desktop agent on the missing machines and allowed their data to
be processed with the others.
In uncovering the missing machines, the organization wanted to further leverage Sherpa’s expertise
through a professional services engagement. Sherpa’s Professional Services team provided the
organization with the manpower and experience to perform the migration.
PST Ownership
The PST files that needed to be processed were ready to be ingested into the appropriate target data
stores. The organization knew that manually assigning users to each PST file would be a cumbersome
Sherpa Software
•
www.sherpasoftware.com
•
Page 3

4. Case Study:
A PST Migration Story
task to perform for 50,000 PST files; as a result, Sherpa recommended the Scan for Ownership process
in Mail Attender to easily automate this requirement and save numerous hours on the project. The Scan
for Ownership process allows Mail Attender to analyze the file to determine which AD user “owns” the
PST.
During this process, Sherpa successfully identified a small number of PST files that did not have owners
assigned because they were either former employees (therefore not in AD) or created from a service
account that did not need to exist. After locating these PST files, the organization determined this data
did not need to be migrated into Exchange.
Phase Three: Migration
Once all of the PST files identified for migration were ready for processing, the end-users were notified to
stop using PST files and anything “new” was not going to be migrated. The report process was run one
final time for up-to-date statistics, and the migration began.
To make this process more manageable, the ingestion was broken up into three groups based on the
user’s name (A – J, K – R and S – Z). The first group was processed during the first week with the
second and third groups following in two-week intervals. Each run took a few minutes to setup and
initialize.
While the groups were processing, Sherpa’s Professional Service team regularly checked that ample
space remained on hard drives for the ingestion process to successfully run. Additionally, Mail Attender
was configured to notify the Sherpa technicians of any PST data that was not able to be processed.
These notifications included specific information on why PST data was not able to be processed to enable
the troubleshooting process to begin immediately.
By the end of the ingestion, about 50 error notifications were received, most of which were regarding
specific message corruption within a PST file. There were also a few messages that were identified by
anti-virus as threats which were promptly quarantined. Additionally, several PST files were located on an
encrypted hard drive and could not be processed. Each of these errors took less than 15 minutes to
identify and troubleshoot.
During the subsequent weeks, reports were run against the destination store to verify that all data was
properly ingested. Of the 50,000 PST files that were processed, less than 50 PST files had issues during
the migration. In case further investigation would be warranted, Sherpa provided the organization with
PST files and individual message failures, as well as final reports reconciling the PST files and the target
data stores.
Conclusion
In a short period of time, the healthcare manufacturing organization was able to evaluate, test, plan,
implement and complete a full PST migration project. Thanks to Mail Attender and Sherpa’s Professional
Service team, this process was automated and efficiently executed. Because the organization was so
impressed with Mail Attender, they decided to further utilize its functionality to apply retention policies
against their mailboxes and archives.
Since this migration, Sherpa has further improved the migration process by adding new features to Mail
Attender. Among other features, the ownership assignment has been improved as it can now be based
on the logged-on user. This assignment increases the speed of determining the PST owner since no
data analysis is necessary. Furthermore, Mail Attender can now be configured to allow the desktop
agents to make the AD queries during the Scan for Ownership assignments, or pass the information
along to the console machines and have them perform the AD queries. This is ideal for companies who
have more restrictive environments, and do not allow AD queries to be performed on the desktops.
Sherpa Software
•
www.sherpasoftware.com
•
Page 4

5. Case Study:
A PST Migration Story
Finally, Mail Attender now has the ability to deduplicate the data being ingested, which can save a
considerable amount of costly space. This deduplication ensures that if a message in a PST file already
exists in the destination store (be it a mailbox, online archive, Office 365 mailbox or Office 365 archive),
its duplicate will not be ingested. In addition, administrators have the option to control the deduplication
at the folder level, or at the store level.
For more information on how Sherpa can help with your PST migration project, please contact us at:
www.sherpasoftware.com or 1-412-206-0005.
About Sherpa Software
Sherpa Software, a leading provider of policy-driven information governance solutions, has helped more
than 3,500 companies worldwide. Sherpa's award-winning software, services and support address
information management, regulatory compliance, electronic discovery, PST management, email archiving
and more. Attender Online, Sherpa Software's signature information governance platform, connects to
more data sources than traditional platforms, leaves your data in-place and offers robust analytics and
metrics, while addressing core business issues. Sherpa is an IBM Business Partner and Microsoft
Certified Partner headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA.
Sherpa Software
•
www.sherpasoftware.com
•
Page 5