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Exchange Migration - 6/17/2008 12:08:10 PM

ltaljaard

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Hi

We are in the process of migrating our users from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003.

The question I have is this, our users have their mail setup to deliver to their personal folder, what I would like to know is what would be the best way to get these users migrated onto 2003.

Also once on the new exchange server would it be best to have them deliver to personal folders or enable cached mode ?

Thank you

Leon

Post #: 1

RE: Exchange Migration - 6/17/2008 2:14:22 PM

jsandys

Posts: 405
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Joined: 3/24/2005
From: San Antonio, TX
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Migrating the users to 2003 is independant of where their mail is stored. Actually, having their mail stored in personal folders make the migration a lot easier and quicker because you don't have to worry about moving their mail to the new server. Also note that the choice for mail storage is an Outlook profile setting, not an Exchange setting.

Personal folders vs cached mode? I'm not sure why you're limiting it to these two options as there is a third, online mode. Do you have a lot of mobile users?

Personal folders are great for one reason, they completely take the burden of mail management off of the server and decentralize it. That is also their biggest weakness. Central control of mail allows for that mail to be backed up and restored, proper av scanning to occur, and issues dealing with compliance to be dealt with. Mail indexing and searching is also much faster for users because PST aren't actually indexed (unless Microsoft Desktop Search is used). This is ultimately an organizationl decision and is completely non-technical.

Are you also considering a follow on migration to Exchange 2007?

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Jason
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(in reply to ltaljaard)

Post #: 2

RE: Exchange Migration - 6/18/2008 12:36:42 AM

ltaljaard

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Joined: 4/25/2008
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Hi Jason

Thank you for your quick reply.

The only thing that bothers me is the initial admin, surely if the users have their mail being delivered to personal folders I would have to have my technicians go to each user, do an export & then an import again once they have been put onto the new server, is there not an easier way ? I have 150 sites that this would have to be done on.

Yes we do have a lot of mobile users but mostly our sites are small, far away & many :)

Yes we are considering a follow on migration to 2007 depending on how smooth this first change over goes.

(in reply to jsandys)

Post #: 3

RE: Exchange Migration - 6/18/2008 1:09:09 AM

kberry

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I feel your pain. When my organization migrated from 5.5 to 2003, we went through the same exercise. We found that about 70% were using POP to get their email and very little used OWA. Management made the decision to have everyone who wanted their emails to pop them off. We went into Exchange 2003 with fresh mailboxes because it wasn't worth the hassle. Now, when we started offering RPC over HTTPS access, we did get requests from users to import their local PSTs back into their Webmail boxes (very little at first, but it jumped as time went on).

(in reply to ltaljaard)

Post #: 4

RE: Exchange Migration - 6/18/2008 1:34:53 AM

ltaljaard

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I wish we could start with new mailboxes & start fresh, if migration was so easy :)

Well creating the new mailoxes on the new servers will be easy, the time consuming part would be the exporting & importing, my tech guys will have to do some running around.

(in reply to kberry)

Post #: 5

RE: Exchange Migration - 6/18/2008 9:55:58 AM

jsandys

Posts: 405
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Joined: 3/24/2005
From: San Antonio, TX
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Improting PSTs can be a time consuming process if you choose to do; however, it can be done centrally by an administrator using EXMerge (or Powershell in Exchange 2007). The only trick here is finding the PSTs or getting the users to put them in a central location. The later is usually way beyond (L)users, so the easier thing to do is to remotely connect to their systems via UNC and copy them to a central location. If you have a tool in place like SMS or ConfigMgr 2007, you can easily automate this or you could write a login script to automate this as well -- note that the location of the user's PSTs is stored in the registry so you shouldn't have to do any searching.

The only technical sticking point in this whole thing is disk space available to Exchange. Often when users have PSTs, they have ballooned out of control. A tool like SMS or ConfigMgr (or a login script) to perform an inventory should be done up front before you get in over your head.

(Automate, Automate, Automate. My theme recently has been that if you are doing something manually in IT, you're doing it wrong.)

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Jason
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(in reply to ltaljaard)

Post #: 6