Re: QUICK 5.5 TO 2003 UPGRADE?

This is what I call a "consulting engagement" question because it's too
complicated for what is basically a short-answer forum. Hire a consultant,
or do a lot of reading so you learn all the ugly side effects of a "drop off
the cliff" approach you're thinking about. Oddly enough, copying or moving
the mail between the two Exchange organizations is about the easiest part;
it's all the other ugly stuff that will bite you in the *** regardless of
where your users keep their mail.
--
Ed Crowley
MVP - Exchange
"Protecting the world from PSTs and brick backups!"

"Dave Durand" <DaveDurand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8F3409EE-DF6C-48B6-A58C-130C7903D62B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I've been administering Exchange since version 4.0 but I'm in an
interesting
bind right now and it was brought about when I was documenting disaster
recovery options for my current employer. I have an environment with two
AD
child domains under a parent domain. The parent domain, let's call it
main.com, is not used for anything other than placement. One child domain
is
corp.main.com and it is running in AD native mode and has Exchange 2003
servers, running in mixed-mode, pretty much servicing the users in this
domain. It also has it's own administrative group (Corp). The other
child
domain, retail.main.com, is not yet running in native mode and has no
Exchange servers however this domain has a trust with two other legacy
"NT4"
domains running a total of 3 Exchange 5.5 servers. One server acts only
as a
bridgehead for all domains and the other two are mailbox servers for this
child domain and one of those two servers handle public folders. This is
clearly remnants of the acquisitions and dispositions, etc.

The odd thing about the Exchange 5.5 servers is that even though they have
2500 users between them, there is nearly no mail as each of them run
Outlook
XP and download the mail to a PST file local to their location.

My question is this...

Is there anyway to literally drop the 5.5 servers off the face of the
earth?
Right now the company's only concern is getting the 2003 environment with
corp users back up and running in the case of a disaster however they
would
like to get the other child domain going at some point eventually as well
so
basically if the AD accounts in the retail.main.com domain suddenly have
orphaned Exchange mailboxes would there be anyway to outright remove that
information in a scripted manner and subsequently create new mailboxes in
Exchange 2003land for them or go through an automated process similar to
MBCONN whereby the Exchange home server path could be altered and a new
mailbox could be created in a storage group/mailbox store on the Exchange
2003 side? This is likely a dumb question but since I don't have any data
in
those mailboxes and I'd like to avoid bringing yet 3 older servers into
the
disaster recovery equation this is what motivates my question.

Trust me...a priority is to migrate out the Exchange 5.5 in a normal
manner
so I can go native mode across the board if possible however I'm curious
if
other options are available since my mailboxes are already empty?

I'm pushing pretty hard for the continuous replication options in Exchange
2007 since maintaining DR is extremely important for the business.

Dave
Phoenix, Arizona


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