Alex, I have performed these types of migrations before. In particular for a large 12,000 seat fast-food restaurant system composed of a number of different email systems including 2 E55, 1 cc:Mail and 1 MS Mail systems. Here are the main issues with these types of migrations (between 2 disparate Exchange organizations): 1. It sounds like you will be integrating E2K servers into one of your existing E55 organizations. I call this a Typical Exchange 2000 Migration. Depending on how many sites you have, you will want to put an E2K server in each of those sites. Once this is done you can move the users from the E55 servers to your E2K servers. You can do this via the admin tools, but it is a pain selecting and migrating them manually. Because I have done this before, I actually have a tool that will batch-automate this process that we have used with a lot of success. 2. The second E55 system will be migrated as a Foreign Mail System. This is referred to as a Foreign Mail System Exchange 2000 Migration. More on this in a minute as this raises a number of issues you will need to be concerned about. 3. Before you do anything, you will want to upgrade your NT4 PDC to Windows 2000 and integrate it with your AD design. This is the NT4 domain where you will be performing the Typical Exchange Migration. You will also want to install the ADC into this domain. Then, you can install your first E2K server and join it to your E55 organization. 4. Because you are joining your E2K system into your existing E55 system, you have solved most/all of your coexistence problems, GAL, messaging connectivity, Free/Busy information and public folders. 5. Because you are joining your E2K system into your existing E55 system, you have solved most/all of your migration problems in terms of getting the mailbox and other data to your new E2K environment. The only issue here is if you want to do this all manually or automate the process. 6. Because your other E55 system is being treated as a Foreign Mail System, you have coexistence and migration issues with this system. Luckily, the migration issues can be addressed through the use of the Exchange Migration Wizard which semi-supports E55. The reason for the semi-support is that unlike every other mail system that the Migration Wizard supports, E55 migrations are implemented by using a PST file for its export medium instead of the standard PRI, PKL, SEC files used for all other migrations. This is a pain because the migration wizard puts a random password on all of those PST's. Again, this can be a real pain to do manually. And again, I have tools, Rocket, to help automate this process. Also, more on migration issues below... 7. Now, coexistence is an issue for the foreign E55 system. You will probably want to think about some type of coexistence between the two systems. Not sure what you have in place today in terms of coexistence, but the main things you will want to be concerned with are a GAL, Messaging connectivity, Free/Busy connectivity and Public Folder synchronization. There are various, largely unsupported tools on various resource kits and other locations that can aid in this effort. However, in all honesty, they are not the greatest tools in the world. Again, since we have run into this before, we created Furnace, which allows one to easily exchange directory, free/busy and public folder information between two disparate Exchange systems (E55 and E2K). This gives you a GAL in each system that contains everything from both systems. 8. Once you get all of your Typical Migration complete, you can switch to Native Mode in Exchange and consolidate your Administrative Groups to simplify your life and no longer be bound by your E55 site definitions. 9. As far as the user logon and access piece of this, depending on how you are configured, you will probably want to clone all of your user accounts in the Foreign Exchange NT domains into your AD structure as mail-enabled users or contacts. This can be done using the ADC or the ADMT tools. Different issues with each of these and different methods will work for different situations. The main item is that users will continue to use their existing account and mailbox until they are migrated. 10. Migration involves a lot of issues and some things will depend on how you do it. You could use certain tools to move the entire "foreign" Exchange server into the E2K/E55 organization. Lots of pros and cons to this approach. The other method, as I mentioned, was the Migration Wizard. Again, pros and cons. Regardless of how you do it, if not everyone will be migrated at the same time, then you have to look at closely at your migration Process. This is very important. You will need to create the mailbox, perform mail redirection, export the data and import the data. Obviously this is simplifying what is involved. The important piece that you will want to think about is email redirection. Exchange uses an X500 address that gets stamped on all messages sent within the Exchange environment. If you do not perform email redirection correctly, users will get bounced mail messages when they reply to the messages of people moved to the new system that were sent prior to the move.
Anyway, hope this helps. Feel free to contact me with any questions. And I agree with Ed. (For perhaps the first time!!) You really should bring in an email migration expert to help you through the process. And yes, that is a shameless plug. > Our company runs EX 5.5 in 2 separate Organizations & NT domains, as well as > 2 separate locations. > To save in migration cost to EX2K, they've decided to migrate to EX2K/W2K/AD > in only 1 location and move all the mailboxes from other location there. > The other location will retain its NT domain scheme, however these users > will have to log on the remote W2K domain now, to access EX2K, across a > Frame Relay (1024kbps). > I thought there has to be a local GC in each location for this work, but > obviously that's not possible in an NT4 domain. > > So I'm just wondering, will this work?! > > Thanks _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:leave-exchange@;ls.swynk.com Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
