A .pst is an Outlook data file for “personal storage table” and consists of emails, calendars, tasks, and details. This file is usually generated when someone exports their Outlook email client data to their desktop.

MS Office 365 services provide an excellent opportunity for businesses to drag runny innovative capabilities to meet what they want. Moving to Exchange Online can be formidable; however, utilization of the Import services to send PST to Office 365 mailbox in the cloud makes this task easy. Suppose you had a particular folder or outlook data files to migrate from PST to Office 365 Mailbox account. In that case, the Import Wizard or an automated solution could be the best possible way to complete the task. This Step-By-Step guide will help you to import PST files to Office 365. We will discuss the following three methods:-

A) Manual import using MS Office 365
B) Import through Office 365 Import tool
C) Import using Powershell commands through Office 365

A) Manual import using Microsoft Office 365 Import Services

Step 1: Navigate to File > Open & Export > Import/Export.
Step 2:text in bold From the Import and Export Wizard, click “Import from another program or file” > then “Next”.
Step 3: Click “Outlook Data File (.pst)” and press click on “Next”.
Step 4: Now, select “Browse” and choose Outlook PST files to import.
Step 5: Once the required files are selected, click “Finish

B) Import through Office 365 Import tool

Step 1: Download and launch “Office 365 Import” tool.
Step 2: Log in to the tool using Admin or user account.

Note: Admin credentials should be used to import PST files to the Office 365 account of multiple users and import PST in Office 365 shared mailbox. User credentials are used to import Outlook data file (.pst) into a single user account.

Step 3: Click on “Add File(s) / Add Folder / Add CSV” to import the PST file.
Step 4_text in bold: Select the Category of the files from the list and apply Filter for each selected category.
Step 5:_text in bold Now click on “Import” to start the process.

C) Import using Powershell commands through Office 365

This lengthy procedure needs prerequisites like an admin account on Office 365 tenant, an admin role on Import Export Mailbox, and high upload bandwidth. Therefore, it is recommended for people who have some technical knowledge as it may even lead to data loss if the steps are not performed correctly.

Step 1: Storage provisioning

a) Launch Office 365 and click on Import Service > Data Migration > Upload PST.
b) Now click on the “+” sign and select “Upload email messages(PST files)”.
c) For the first import, the Storage account will be created. Then, click on “Show network upload SAS URL”. The url includes storage account name, container name, and shared access signature.

Note: Shared access signature contains:

sv -> storage service version
se -> expiration date
sr -> storage type
si -> storage identifier
sig -> signature

Step 2: Upload PST

After completing the first step, i.e. storage provisioning, the user can now begin uploading PST files. The user can use the AzCopy tool(Command line tool) or Azure Storage Explorer(Graphical tool).

a) Connect to Azure Storage Explorer.
b) Enter the “Shared Access Signature(SAS) URL” or an “account key”. After entering it, the user sees “Connection Summary”.
c) Now import PST using the Azure Storage Explorer tool.
d) To check the list of files present on Azure use:

New-AzureStorageContext -SasToken ($SharedAccessSignatureURL -split ‘?’ | Select-Object -Last 1) -StorageAccountName ($SharedAccessSignatureURL -split ‘.’ -split ‘//’)[1] | Get-AzureStorageBlob -Container ($SharedAccessSignatureURL -split ‘?’ -split ‘/’)[3] | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name

Step 3: Mapping the file

When the PST file has been uploaded to Azure Storage successfully, we need to build a CSV file. The CSV file will be used to map the PST file to mailboxes and destination folders.

Step 4: Import PST

Now we need to import the PST mapping file and click on “Finish”. The PST file will be imported to the Online Archive in Office 365.

Conclusion

We discussed the user query “How to Import PST to Office 365 mailbox account?”. Both manual and quick solutions are discussed here to help you migrate the Outlook PST file to Office 365.

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