Leading ICT solutions provider exports the required mailbox from decommissioned Exchange Server & AD

Dec 02 , 2019
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Emid is a leading ICT and financial solutions provider based in South Africa, with over 11000 employees and presence in 33 African countries. The organization was using Exchange Server 2007, with mailboxes backed up on Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape for routine back up and offline archival process.

Business Need

The organization needed to retrieve emails from a specific mailbox that was backed up on an LTO tape created in the year 2015.
However, the organization had moved to Exchange Server 2016, with a new domain controller and Active Directory.
The old Active Directory–used with Exchange Server 2007 setup–was decommissioned as it was on a physical server.

Key Challenges

The IT team of the organization identified the following challenges associated with this need:

1.) Rebuilding the older domain

As the previous Active Directory was decommissioned, the domain wasn’t available to allow for restoration of the mailbox from LTO backup. So, the IT team would need to rebuild the domain with Exchange Server and domain controller.

Since the backup was of a physical server, it would also need to install the operating system that was in use at that time for bare-metal restoration of the server and the Active Directory.

The IT team also identified the need to procure ISO images of the operating system and Exchange Server for restoring the server. Since it was Exchange Server 2007 -which doesn’t have a direct export method- a 32-bit machine with 32-bit Microsoft Office would be needed along with the Exchange tools to export the mailbox.

2.) Shortage of time

This was estimated to be a lengthy exercise that would take a few weeks due to the size of the mail server; the old Exchange Server had a single 400 GB database with 200 mailboxes. The duration could further prolong, given that the mailbox -containing the required emails- was not particularly known.

Besides the number of days estimated to restore the Active Directory and Exchange Server, the IT team also needed to ensure that both these would be working successfully. Time posed a major challenge because the organization’s leadership wanted earliest possible access to the mailbox data.

3.) Hardware cost

Apart from time and technical hassles, the company had resource challenges. Aside from RAM and CPU power, a new server would need to be commissioned for this server restoration requirement, and the budget for this was estimated to be higher than expected.

Solution

The IT manager assessed the challenges with ‘hardware’ based mailbox restoration approach, and decided to evaluate alternatives for faster mailbox restoration at a lower cost.

The company decided to give Stellar Converter for EDB a try. After restoring the EDB file from tape, the IT team simply installed Stellar EDB to PST Converter on a machine. It was as simple as opening the application, adding the offline EDB file, waiting a few minutes until the first scan of the file, select the mailbox and export to PST file. With the application, it was easier to export the required mailbox with minimal effort and no complex restores.

Results

The Sales team where given the mailbox data way before the deadline and where able to conclude on the project. They were able to restore just the folder where the required data was saved rather than the whole mailbox.

Key Benefits

Faster Restoration: The required mailbox was restored in less than 30 minutes after the EDB file was restored from tape. The filtering option in the software allowed restoring the specific folder from the mailbox, so, the process was much faster than restoring the machines and manually exporting the mailbox. Bare-metal restoration of Active Directory Server and the Exchange Server would have taken days to restore just one mailbox.

Cost Effectiveness: There was no need to restore the server and purchase any special hardware for server restoration. Stellar Converter for EDB made it easy to restore the mailbox to PST with minimal effort and without the need to restore the entire Active Directory Server and the Exchange Server.

Dec 02 , 2019
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