Monday, June 05, 2006
Exchange Migration
Before I even give the client prices for servers and software, I am trying to get an idea just what will be involved and whether there are any showstoppers in doing the upgrade and migration I have envisioned.
I was pretty alarmed when I saw that there is no direct migration path from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003, and that you had to either go to 2000 first or use something called exmerge, which I have never used.
It also sounded like Exchange 2003 is so tied into Active Directory that I’d maybe have to worry about having any remaining workstations that are not running Windows 2000 or XP.
The weird thing is that reading all this material; the KB articles and whitepapers and such, it’s like studying. Or even a bit like programming or doing accounting work, where it works best if you “zone” and otherwise is marginally productive or doesn’t “stick.”
So. Anyone have any thoughts on whether such an upgrade might be as painful as I fear? It’s only a single Exchange 5.5 server, not counting the proxy install for the sake of the internet mail connector. There are about 50 people, plus a variety of other mailboxes, and residual mailboxes of people no longer there, some of which could perhaps be purged. The network is NT4, with a PDC and BDC, plus the other, standalone servers, and the Windows 2000 server where Exchange currently resides. Another goal is to upgrade to Windows 2003 and no longer have NT running the network, but obviously to do so as gracefully as possible. Ironically, this is probably a bigger change than when I migrated them from Novell to NT, which was easy because they were able to overlap, and because Exchange was new in conjunction with that. But I digress.
I just don’t want to order a particular server and software combo, only to find that I am unable to port things to it fairly readily.