How to migrate room and equipment mailboxes

Problem:

Resource mailboxes, such as rooms and equipment, are not listed in CodeTwo Office 365 Migration and CodeTwo Exchange Migration, so they cannot be migrated to any server.

Solution:

Although the migration of resource mailboxes is not supported, there is a workaround that allows you to migrate them as regular mailboxes, and then convert them manually to room or equipment mailboxes. To apply this solution, you need to:

• enable your resource mailboxes in Active Directory,
• convert the migrated mailboxes to resource mailboxes in PowerShell.

Enable resource mailboxes in Active Directory

Resource mailboxes are, by default, disabled in Active Directory, and that is why they are not listed in our migration tools. To fix this, you need to enable them. To do so, follow these steps:

1. On your Domain Controller, open Active Directory Users and Computers. 
2. Select Users in the left pane, and then right-click your room or equipment mailbox and select Properties (Fig. 1.).

Fig. 1. Accessing the properties of your resource mailbox.

3. Go to the Account tab. Under Account options find the Account is disabled checkbox and clear it (Fig. 2.).

Fig. 2. Enabling mailbox account in Active Directory.

4. Click Apply to save changes and then click OK to close the window.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for every resource mailbox that you want to migrate.
6. Restart CodeTwo migration software.

After these changes, all resource mailboxes become visible in our migration tools, and you can migrate them. Note that after migration these resource mailboxes become regular (user) mailboxes and you need to convert them back, as shown below.

Convert user mailboxes to resource mailboxes

To convert any regular (user) mailbox to a resource mailbox, use the Set-Mailbox cmdlet in PowerShell. You also need to provide the appropriate Type parameter, i.e. Room or Equipment, depending on the type of resource mailbox you want to get.

For example, the cmdlet below converts a regular mailbox to a room mailbox:

Set-Mailbox <mailbox_name> -Type Room

If you want to convert a regular mailbox to an equipment mailbox, use the following cmdlet instead:

Set-Mailbox <mailbox_name> -Type Equipment