PST to G Suite (IMAP) Migration Guide

This is the complete onboarding task flow for migrating PST (Outlook Data File) files into G Suite mailboxes.

First migration?

We’ve created a guide on scoping, planning, and managing the migration process for your use. If this is your first migration, we recommend reading this guide carefully.

MigrationWiz

MigrationWiz is a migration tool, not a syncing tool. If changes are made at the source after migration, they will not sync to the destination, nor will changes made at the destination sync to the source. We do not have “live” monitoring of changes (as with a sync agent) and we cannot handle scenarios such as conflict resolution without user interaction.

MigrationWiz supports the capability to share migration projects across a Workgroup. When the Project Sharing feature is turned on, all Agents besides those who are Inactive can view all migration projects. 

Prerequisites

The following requirements for PST files need to be met:

  • PST files need to be in Outlook 2003 (or later) format.
  • PST files cannot be corrupted. We do not provide an automated solution for repairing or migrating corrupted PST files. In case there are corrupted PST files, fix them before performing a migration.
  • If UploaderWiz is installed:
    • Windows Vista or later is required for desktops. Mac OS is not supported.
    • Installed .NET 4.6 or later.
    • Permission to run a command prompt as Administrator.

Compared to standard mailbox migrations, the key difference is that PST files need to be discovered and uploaded to a secure Azure Storage account before a migration.

Licensing

Purchase and apply User Migration Bundle licenses for all the users being migrated. For this migration type, we suggest the User Migration Bundle. For questions on licensing, visit MigrationWiz Licenses.

  • User Migration Bundle Licenses have unlimited data available per license.
  • User Migration Bundle Licenses are applied to the customer's users and expire 12 months after their purchase date. 
  • Document, Personal Archive, and DeploymentPro projects are all included when using User Migration Bundle Licenses.
  • This license type must be applied manually.

To use your license by following the next steps:

  1. Purchase Licenses.
  2. Create a Customer.
  3. Apply Licenses.
  4. Review Considerations.
Purchase Licenses Create a Customer Apply Licenses Considerations

Purchase licenses by following the steps below:

  1. Sign in to your BitTitan account. 
  2. In the top navigation bar, click Purchase.
  3. Click the Select button and choose User Migration Bundle licenses.
  4. Enter the number of licenses you want to purchase. Click Buy Now.
  5. Enter a Billing address if applicable.
  6. Click Next.
  7. Review the Order Summary and enter a payment method.
  8. Click Place Your Order.

Important

Each PST migration license allows for up to 10GB of data to be migrated. If the total file size for a single line item in MigrationWiz is greater than 10GB, then you must configure that line item to consume more than a single license. Otherwise, the migration fails for that item. To do so:

  • Ensure that you purchased a pool of licenses to account for a potential overrun.
  • Enter the maximum number of licenses consumed per line item.
  • Click Save. Items in the migration project now have permission to consume more than a single license.

Limitations

  • App password usage, MFA/2FA, and ADFS are not supported for the migration service accounts being used for this migration scenario. 
  • The maximum file size for migration through MigrationWiz varies by migration type and environment, but may never exceed 60GB.
  • Below is a list of items that can and cannot be migrated when PST is the source. This list can change without notice, so double-check this list before any migrations.

Migrated Items

Please click the bar below to check the migrated and non-migrated items. We are constantly working to create a better migration experience for you so these items may change over time.

What items are and are not migrated?

PST Files from your own Azure storage.

Migrated

  • Folders
  • Email
  • Contacts
  • Calendars
  • Tasks
  • Journals
  • Notes

Not migrated

  • Follow Up flags

PST BitTitan Storage 

PST Files are uploaded to BitTitan Storage using the UploaderWiz tool.

Migrated

  • Folders
  • Email
  • Contacts
  • Calendars
  • Tasks
  • Journals
  • Notes

Amazon Storage

Items with the Storage Class "Glacier" - Items archived to cold storage by Amazon's retention policy - are not migrated

Prepare the Azure Environment

  1. Estimate Azure storage costs. This step is optional but is useful in providing the customer with upfront storage costs ahead of time.
  2. Buy an Azure subscription, or use the free one-month trial. The trial option is only viable if you are performing a very small migration.
  3. Create an Azure storage account. You will need to set up a STORAGE (General Purpose v2) account rather than a storage blob.
  4. Take note of the storage account name and the primary access key. (In Azure, from the storage screen, click Manage Access Keys at the bottom of the screen). These need to be entered into the MigrationWiz migration project when specifying the destination settings. 

To create the Azure storage account, follow the steps below:

  1. Visit the Azure portal.
  2. Click Storage accounts.
  3. Click Create.
  4. Select the Subscription and create a new Resource group or use a current one.
  5. Name the Storage account.
  6. For Region, select a geographic region for the storage account.
  7. For Performance, select Standard general-purpose V2 account.
  8. In the Redundancy field, select Locally-redundant storage (LRS).
  9. Click the Review button.
  10. When the validation ends, click the Create button.
  11. Once the deployment of the storage account is complete, click the Go to resource button or open up the home page for the new storage account.
  12. In the Security + networking section of the left sidebar, click on Access Keys.
  13. On a notepad, copy the Storage account name and the key1 and save them.

Now the storage account appears in the storage list.

Prepare the Destination Environment

Please review the following prerequisites before preparing your environment.

  • Enabling access is required for both G Suite mailbox and Google Drive document migration projects.
  • Mailbox migration projects require a G Suite administrator to grant access to the BitTitan client ID and scopes listed in this article.
  • Document migration projects require that a G Suite Super administrator grant access to the BitTitan client ID and scopes listed in this article and enable the API access. The steps to do this are included at the bottom of this article.

Grant MigrationWiz OAuth 2.0 Access to G Suite

BitTitan products use OAuth 2.0 to authenticate to G Suite and utilize the G Suite (IMAP) endpoint in MigrationWiz. This applies to both mailbox and document migration projects. To configure the OAuth access within your G Suite environment, follow the directions in this article.

Enabling access is required for both G Suite mailbox and Google Drive document migration projects. To access your G Suite data, it is necessary to add specifically allowed API scopes to the MigrationWiz project. 

Steps in the G Suite Admin Console

Complete these steps to grant BitTitan client ID access to the appropriate scopes:

  1. Go to https://admin.google.com and authenticate as a Super Administrator.
  2. In the admin console, go to Menu Google_Menu.png > Click Security > Access and data control > API controls> Manage Domain Wide Delegation.

    Warning

    If you do not see the security icon on your admin console home page, your account does not have the necessary rights to make these changes. 
    Google limits settings access and configuration to only G Suite Super Administrator accounts.
  3. Click Add New.
  4. Enter 113321175602709078332 into the Client ID field. 
  5. Enter the following groups of scopes into the OAuth Scopes (comma-delimited) field:
    • G Suite as the Destination (full scopes):
      https://mail.google.com/, https://www.google.com/m8/feeds, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.group, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.user, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive, https://sites.google.com/feeds/, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.settings.sharing, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.settings.basic,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts 
  6. Click Authorize.

The client name is 113321175602709078332 (make sure there are no leading or trailing spaces, as this may cause the error "URL ends with an invalid top-level domain name."). This will grant BitTitan products access to the appropriate scopes.

If you are migrating to multiple domains, repeat these steps for each domain.

Discover PST Files and Upload to Azure

Discover PST files on the network, and upload them into Azure.

MigrationWiz Steps

Create a Personal Archive Migration project

  1. Click the Go to My Projects button.
  2. Click the Create Project button.
  3. Select the Personal Archive Project type.
  4. Click Next Step.
  5. Enter a Project name and select a Customer.
  6. Click Next Step.
  7. Select or create the source and destination endpoints. 
  8. Click Save Project.

Endpoints

Endpoints are created through MigrationWiz. If you select an existing endpoint from the dropdown, it will only show ten endpoints. If you have more than ten, you may need to search it.

Consider that endpoint search is case and character-specific. For example, Cust0mer will not show up if the search is customer. We recommend keeping a list of endpoints you have created, along with any unique spellings or capitalization you may have used.

You may either use existing endpoints or create new ones.

Create your Endpoints

Please review the following tabs to create your destination and source endpoints.

Source Endpoint Destination Endpoint

Create your source endpoint by following the next steps:

  1. Click New.
  2. Choose an Endpoint Name.
  3. Select PST as the endpoint type.
  4. Enter the Storage Account Name and Access Key in the fields provided.

    Important

    Only numbers and lowercase letters can be used when entering the Azure Storage Account Name for the source endpoint. If you enter an upper case letter, your migration will fail.
  5. Click Add.

Region of Destination Tenant

The Region of Destination Tenant feature optimizes the migration performance and speed by choosing the region closest to the destination tenant. MigrationWiz displays a dropdown that allows you to select the destination region when configuring your destination endpoint

Tip

You can find the region of your destination tenant directly in the Admin Console by navigating to Data > Compliance > Data Regions.
For more information about the region of your destination tenant review the Choosing the Region of the Destination Tenant article, where you can find the recommended ways to verify it.

Warning

If you do not complete this field you will not be able to save your project and the “This field cannot be left blank.” error will appear

Endpoint Validation

Once the information has been provided for both, the source and destination endpoint, and the customer selects Save and Go to Summary, MigrationWiz performs an endpoint validation check.

This validation tests the administrator credentials entered into the project and the Modern Authentication setup only. If there is an issue, the screen redirects to the endpoint and provides an error message or flyout that can be selected for more information regarding the error.

Add Users

Add the user accounts that will be migrated to the project.

Advanced Options

The following sections describe the tabs available for Advanced Options in this kind of migration.

Support Tab

Consider that each Support Option includes the "=" character and is to be entered under the Support tab in the section named Support Options.

Add additional blank fields for new Support Options by clicking on the "+" button. In case you want to delete a field click the trash can icon.

AO Support Tab.jpg

Optional Settings

  • PSTCustomEndpointSuffix=Azure URI This is optional. The Azure URI needs to be changed to one of the following values:
    • cloudapi.de (Germany)
    • usgovcloudapi.de (government)

      Important

      This Advanced Option only needs to be added if you are uploading your PST files to a specific Azure data center, using the UploaderWiz optional parameter of azurelocation=gov or ger.
  • Add FolderMapping="^->PST/" We recommend that you add this Advanced Option so that the items in the PST file will be mapped to a folder on the Destination, rather than into the root of the Inbox, and maintain the folder hierarchy. This helps your end users locate the items in their PST files, once migrated. 

Source/Destination Tab

The default Bucket Name is set to "migrationwiz". If you are using your own Azure storage and have uploaded your PST files into a container that has a different name than "migrationwiz", change the bucket name to the same name. For example, if your Azure storage container is named "pstblob", change the bucket name in Advanced Options to "pstblob". If these do not match, you will get an error when trying to import your PST files from Azure into your MigrationWiz dashboard.

Import PST files

Import PST files into the MigrationWiz PST archive project.

  1. Click the Autodiscover Items bar.
  2. Click the Start Autodiscover button.
  3. Once the PST files have been discovered, click the green + Import Items.
  4. If 0 items are discovered, a common mistake is that the Source/Bucket Name under Project Advanced Options has not been set to the correct Azure container name.

Choose Destination Mailbox

Choose which Destination mailbox to inject each PST file into.

The owner's email address should be displayed under the "Destination Email" column.
If change.me@bittitan.com is displayed as the Destination email address instead of the actual owner's email address, click the Edit Item (pencil icon) to the right of the row. Then, under the Destination Email Address field, enter the mailbox that this file will be ingested into.

If you have multiple PST files to migrate into a single mailbox, click the pencil icon next to the individual migration item. Then, under Source PST Path, click the Add button (the +) to add the additional PST path(s).

Run Verify Credentials

  1. Open the Project containing items you wish to validate.
  2. Select the items you wish to validate.
  3. Click the Start button in your dashboard.
  4. Select Verify Credentials from the drop-down list.

Once complete, the results of the verification will be shown in the Status section.​ 

Start Migration

  1. Select the users.
  2. Click the Start button from the top.
  3. Select Full Migration.
  4. Click Start Migration.

Run Retry Errors

Look through the user list and click any red "failed migration" errors. Review the information and act accordingly.

If problems persist, contact Support.

Post Migration

Optional (does not apply to Microsoft storage): Delete the Azure blob container, created during the upload to Azure. This will prevent incurring post-migration Azure costs for these containers. Be careful to only delete the created container for this migration project.

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