Exchange Online customers: Microsoft is retiring Exchange Web Services. Here is what administrators need to do.
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Step 2: Move Notate Drive to OneDrive

For Exchange Online tenants only. If your organization uses on-premises Exchange, nothing here applies to you.

This step moves each user's Notate Drive (their private notes, documents and folders) from their Exchange mailbox to their own OneDrive. It takes one setting in your MDM, and Notate does the rest on each device.

Before you start

Check

Why

Step 1 is done. Notate is on your tenant's EWS allow-list.

The move reads each user's data from Exchange through EWS, so EWS has to be working while it runs. See Step 1: Keep EWS working until April 2027.

Your users are on the current release of Notate.

Earlier releases do not know the OneDrive setting.

Each user’s OneDrive is provisioned in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Notate Drive moves into the user’s own OneDrive, so it has to exist first. Microsoft creates it the first time the user opens OneDrive, unless you provision it in advance.

You do not need new Microsoft Entra ID permissions, server software, an Azure subscription or any extra Microsoft charges. The permissions you already granted to Notate cover OneDrive.

Change the setting

In your MDM's app configuration for Notate, set notateDriveMode to migrate_to_onedrive.

The setting reaches each device the next time it checks in with your MDM, and Notate applies it the next time the user signs in. There is nothing else to do.

If you would like to see it on a few devices first, give a small group of users their own copy of the Notate configuration with this setting, and change everyone else's when you are ready. Your MDM can give different configurations to different groups of users.

What your users see

  • A short confirmation that Notate is moving their Notate Drive to OneDrive.

  • A progress display while Notate copies their notes and folders. If the copy is interrupted, for example because the device goes offline, it resumes where it left off.

  • When it is done, their Notate Drive is in a folder named Notate Drive (app-managed) in their OneDrive, and they carry on working in Notate as before.

Nothing is deleted from Exchange. The copy in the mailbox is frozen and stays visible in Outlook.

To check that it worked

Open a user's OneDrive: the folder Notate Drive (app-managed) is there and holds their Notate folders, notes and documents.

Good to know

  • The files are ordinary OneDrive files. Users can open and edit them from OneDrive as well as from Notate. The one thing to avoid is changing or deleting the .notate folder inside Notate Drive, which holds Notate's own data (cached files, favorites, recents and the app policies you set). If it is deleted, Notate rebuilds most of it.

  • Timing. Microsoft removes EWS for Exchange Online permanently on April 1, 2027. Every Notate user needs to have moved before then.

  • Afterwards. Once every user has moved, the legacy Exchange permission can be removed from Notate's Entra application.

If you turned on Tasks, Calendar or Contacts

These features are retired in Notate 2026, and the allowDeprecatedFeatures policy only brings them back while a user's Notate data is in Exchange. After a user moves to OneDrive, Tasks, Calendar and Contacts no longer appear in Notate. The data stays in their mailbox and is still available in Outlook. If your users rely on them, let them know before they move.

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