Why would you want to move users between different mail
storage quotas you’ve granted to various users over the years? Maybe you’ve run
out of disk space on your mail server. Or maybe you want to more easily
administer the myriad of different mail storage quotas you’ve granted to
various users over the years. You could also decide to break users up on to
servers in different geographic locations to provide for better fault tolerance.

Whatever reason you have, while moving users might sound a
little intimidating and worrisome at first, once you do it, you’ll wonder what
all the fuss was.

You can move users between information stores using either
the Exchange System Manager or Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC).

  • From
    the Exchange System Manager, go to Servers > (your Exchange server
    name) > First Storage Group (or whatever storage group houses the
    account you want to move) > (Mailbox store that presently houses the
    user’s mailbox).
  • Make
    sure to expand the mailbox store so you see the three options Logons,
    Mailboxes and Full-Text Indexing.
  • Choose
    the Mailboxes option and right-click the mailbox for the user you want to
    move. From the resulting shortcut menu, choose Exchange Tasks. This starts
    the Exchange Tasks wizard, which guides you through the process.

If you want to use ADUC instead:

  • Locate
    the user in ADUC.
  • Right-click
    the user account and choose Exchange Tasks. This
    opens the same wizard. If you like, you can select multiple accounts at
    the same time so you can perform this operation in a single step.

(Note: In both tools, you can select multiple accounts at
the same time so you can perform this operation in a single step.)

  • On the
    Available Tasks page of the wizard, choose the Move Mailbox option. Even
    though it says that the mailbox is moved to a different server, that’s
    actually not quite accurate as this process can be used to move the
    mailbox to a different store on the same server.
  • On the
    resulting screen, choose the server and mailbox store to which you would
    like to move this mailbox and click Next. You can
    opt to schedule this task, or to run it immediately. Make sure to allow
    Exchange to create a failure report in case there is a problem.

When you’re finished, Exchange provides you with a summary
of the successes and failures so that you can take the appropriate steps.