Microsoft today announced the public preview of the new Office 365 Import Service to make email archive migration easier. It provides two new options for speeding up the process of importing PST files into Exchange Online mailboxes. Office 365 Commercial, Office 365 Education and multi-tenant Government (Government Pricing) customers are eligible to participate in the preview.
- Option 1: For smaller sets of data, we are enabling network uploads of PST files to Microsoft servers, which we then import into Exchange Online mailboxes.
- Option 2: For larger datasets, you can copy PST archive files onto hard drives and mail them directly to Microsoft datacenters. Once we receive the drives, we copy the PST files to internal servers and then import the mail into Exchange Online mailboxes.
Office 365 Import Service sits on top of the Azure Import Export service. When you upload your data or physically ship your hard drives, the data is temporarily staged within Microsoft Azure file storage until it is imported into Exchange Online mailboxes. Both of these options use our internal datacenter network, with significantly faster throughput and lower latency.
Read more about it here.