How to migrate mailboxes in exchange

July 31, 2006 10:17 AM

My company is splitting up soon. We have centralised exchange servers in another country, I need to get away fast.

(I am UK based)

My company has 11 offices world wide. All mail is provided via exchange servers (2003) in the US, everyone connects via rpc-connected Outlook 2003. It works fine. We also have an OWA server in the US.

We are 'breaking' up the company, specifically my office is breaking away and we are retaining the company name etc.

I'm most likely not keeping the equipment in the US, I just want the content.

We are single domain AD, with DC's in each site, exchange is in the same domain. Its all fairly simple.

I am planning to create a new domain here, ready to migrate users on to. I'll buy a sexy new exchange server and some storage, re-task some servers as new DC's on my domain.

The Exchange server here will be on a new domain. Can I trust this into the existing organisation in such away that I can transfer mailboxes etc? Once I have transferred mailboxes, I need to cut off from the old domain, never to be reconnected.

posted by daveyt to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Mailboxes have discrete identifiers that are related to AD identities in a way that includes some black magic, I'm convinced. Even restoring mailboxes to a domain that was faithfully recreated with all of the same values and same names for the users requires some manual system for linking mailbox data up to a specific user.

When I last had to go through that debacle, I had to use a 3rd party program to facilitate the relationship between the restored mailboxes and the users. Luckily, I found one, at the time, that had a 30 day trial, and I could use it and dispense with it.

I'm not familiar with what features SP2 may have added to 2003 to help this process, but rest assured: You're in for a world of pain.
posted by thanotopsis at 10:23 AM on July 31, 2006

You could use exmerge to drop all the mailboxes to .pst files and then re-incorporate them back into your new Exchange server. Or you could just create .pst files manually and copy all the all the data out manually.
posted by internal at 10:37 AM on July 31, 2006

i suppose what i'm trying to say is, can i:

Install new domain
Trust between domains
Sort out permissions etc
Do Move Mailboxes
Delete trust
Dont look back.
?
posted by daveyt at 10:59 AM on July 31, 2006

Internal's got it. It's the simplest way to keep all the content and move it to a new Exchange setup.
posted by Merdryn at 11:18 AM on July 31, 2006

What internal said. There is a new version of exmerge you have to use for Exchange 2003 Server and there are special permissions that need to be configured to allow this to happen. KB article is here. Having individual users just export their mailboxes to pst files on the local computers and importing the mail once the new accounts are configured is probably an easier way to go, depending on how many users there are.
posted by white_devil at 11:39 AM on July 31, 2006

Yes, internal has it. You should export the mailboxes and import them into a fresh, new store on your new, shiny AD domain.

If you don't, you'll run into issues later with the old trust still hanging around. As one example, your System Attendant mailbox (which is created/used by Exchange only) is deeply tied to AD. Moving a mailbox store (even by using Move Mailboxes) won't pick up the SA mailbox. "Move Mailboxes" is really designed to move data between stores in the same forest. You're losing the forest. Therefore and henceforth, any updates that require interaction with that mailbox (such as an in-place upgrade, etc.) will fail because it will look for the old AD- SA to authenticate. At that point, you'll end up creating a brand new Exchange organization to pick up the new SA mailbox.

Trust me. Exmerge is your friend.
posted by disclaimer at 2:37 PM on July 31, 2006

What they all said, and I'll add another practicality to the mix -- theoretically, you could use exmerge to extract and import in one step, from old server to new. Unless the mailboxes in question are TINY, or you have dedicated access to a transatlantic gigabit fibre cable -- have the mailboxes extracted in the US to a removable hdd / tape / whatever, then have it shipped to yourself.
posted by coriolisdave at 3:07 PM on July 31, 2006

Ok, advice taken. I'm going to install an MSX here on the existing domain, move mailboxes. Then I'll do the exmerge to get everything to pst files, rebuild the exchange server and restore mail. thanks all.
posted by daveyt at 3:15 AM on August 1, 2006