Moving an Exchange Server 2003 mailbox to 2010 throws the error: “The property value is invalid. The value can't contain leading or trailing whitespace.”

Through the migrations from Exchange Server 2003 to 2010 I’ve done in the past, I’ve never ran into a problem I encountered over this weekend and while it looks like it’s quite common, I figure I’d blog about it anyways so I can reference my own notes in the future.

Problem

You attempt to move a mailbox from Exchange Server 2003 to 2010 but the process fails with the following error:

Summary: 1 item(s). 0 succeeded, 1 failed.
Elapsed time: 00:00:01

Morgan Smith
Failed

Error:
The property value is invalid. The value can't contain leading or trailing whitespace.
Click here for help... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.exch.err.default(EXCHG.141).aspx?v=14.1.218.11&t=exchgf1&e=ms.exch.err.Ex9E6D8B

Exchange Management Shell command attempted:
'SomeNamenet.com/SomeName School/SomeName Users/SomeName Secondary Students/S8/Morgan Smith' | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase 'SomeName Students - Light'

Elapsed Time: 00:00:01

Solution

The reason and solution can be found at the following link: http://www.msexchangeblog.nl/2011/02/18/migrating-exchange-2003-to-exchange-2010-notes-from-the-field/ but just in case it ever becomes unavailable, the reason why you’re encountering this error is because the user’s mailbox you are moving has a display name that either has a leading or trailing white space.  Here’s an example:

**Note the trailing white space at the end of the n.

If you only have one or two accounts that have this problem, you can easily fix this by remove the user’s leading or trailing white space by editing the properties.  If you have more than one of these accounts, you can use the solution as described in the blog post I mentioned above.