Exchange 5.5 to 2000 upgrade? transfer mail boxes?

[Busie23]

We are upgrading our mail server and are planning on upgrading to 2000. I have read that there has been a few problems transfering over the data. Anyone have any experiences doing this? Any tips, uility's, etc would be great!

 

[Saltin]

I have a good deal of experience in 5.5 >> Ex 2k upgrades. There is more than one way to do it.
To be perfectly honest with you, it's not the sort of job you are going to want to tackle without lots of background and documentation. I would consider myself fairly strong with Active Directory, Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2k and there were still things that stumped me the first time I did an upgrade.

You need to know and understand the Active Directory Connector inside out. There are also numerous "gotchas" that you have to prepare for.

I've done upgrades a couple of ways. One method is the inplace upgrade... more suitable to a smaller, single mail server. I've had the easiest time with a second method, building a new Ex2k server and adding it in to the exisiting Exchange organization. Assuming you have the ADC under control, you can then simply move the mailboxes on to the new server.....

Either way, what I have described is a vast over-simplification of the processes involved. There is a tonne of documentation available to help you with this sort of thing. I would recommend doing at least a weeks worth of reading and two trial runs in a lab before you move ahead with it. There are all sorts of things that can happen.

5.5 >> 2k upgrades in production environments seperate the men from the boys. You can do it, but prepare properly. Do your reading , do your testing, and then move forward when you are ready. Don't rush it.

When you are finally ready to move through it get started, and when you have issues, post them here. It's much easier to answer specific problems then describe the lengthy and complicated process of the upgrade.


Good luck!

 

[bozo1]

My experience has been the same as Saltin's.

You do know that you have to have Active Directory up and running first don't you? Many people often plan on upgrading Exchange without knowing that AD needs to be there as well.

 

[Santa]

I have only done a Exchange 5.5 Standard --> Exchange 5.5 Enterprise upgrade but from what I hear it is somewhat similar. (minus the AD needs)

Even the exmerge method isn't fullproof I can tell you that. Sometimes mailboxes get missed for some weird unknown reason on reimporting.

I have heard of 3 differnt methods and have used only one which is exmerge.. modify an exported csv to import and create new mailboxes and reimport from the exmerged data.

Worked but wasn't as smooth as I hear moving the mailbox from one server to another was but we also wanted to change Org site. We had to reenter all data for the individual mailbox besides their name and smtp address since export utility didn't provide anything but just the name and address information.

We recently got a new tool to allow us to sweep across the mailbox accounts adding in differnt fields automatically (ill have to look up name) but that should help later if we ever run into the problem again.

I would go with Saltin's recommendation of research research research and look more to adding a second server that you can just move the mailboxes to. This way you have all the kinks worked out in bringing Exchange 2000 online without having to worry about doing it all in one weekend like I did. Whew was that major rush that weekend knowing everything was hanging on the balance of that transfer.

Nothing beats having someone along side you (literally) who has extensive exchange knowledge and better yet someone who has been through one of these migrations. A consultant fee is nothing compared to the loss manhour you will incur if you mess this one up.

 

[Tallgeese]

I successfully completed just such a migration in September of last year.
It went VERY smoothly...but ONLY because I planned, planned, planned...then planned some more, then tested it 2 ways to Sunday!
When we actually did the migration, none of our users even knew it was going on

MS themselves recommends moving mailboxes to a separate server.
In-place migrations are HIGHLY discouraged.

Also, this process has a very low tolerance for any error, not just in your AD implementation, but also in your Exchange 5.5 directory.
A LOT of cleanup afterwards too.

Here is the primary resource I used...

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 316886 HOW TO: Migrate from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange 2000 Server

Notice that the document isn't that long really, but it has a LOT of embedded references.
Be sure and research all those THOROUGHLU

 

[Busie23]

I'm just starting to research it and figured I would ask here first. It looks like we will be getting to that server in about 3-4 weeks, and we are getting all new servers, so we will be setting up exchange 2000 first on the ner server and hopefully be able to "just" transfer over the mailboxes.

On another side note, we just bought another domain name and the powers that be want a new email address added to all 200 some mailboxes? So I have to get those added in there somehow, and hopefuly not by adding each one individually?

We have a programming dept at our disposal that could whip something up real quick if need be. Are there any utilities that can help out on this task?

Thanks for the great info so far!

 

[Saltin]

In Exchange 2k, email address templates are handled by RUS (Recipient Update Services). You can easily apply the same template to everyone, so that thier email addy is username@yourdomain.com

By default, it will be your internal AD domain name suffix, but you can change it to anything.

Example, my Domain is domain.local, and my email server recieves for domain.com