[ranjb]

A question I had was what do other organisations do when they migrate emails from one system to another. In our case it will be single instance of exchange 2003 to exchange 2007 for our staff mailboxes. I be interested to hear what stategy do IT Managers use to move onto a new system. We currently have 150 staff who use OWA 2003, there are a few staff (approx 5) who use outlook on the PC's rather than OWA.

Can I ask if anyone does any of the following:

Move all mailboxes from one email server to another, so all users have all the emails like they did in the old system.

A Clean slate. New email server has no old emails. Archive all emails to a PST file which staff can access if they need to see an email from the previous system using a local version of outlook.

Only migrate a certain amount of emails e.g move 6-12 months worth of emails and archive the rest. Does Microsoft or a third party offer any tools to allow you to do this so whilst moving moving over to exchange 2007 whilst it moves the mailboxes you can define to say only move the last 12 months worths of emails?

I am really keen on doing option 3 but not sure if its possible. I heard of products like Quest but looking on their website I couldnt find anything which said their product can do this. Any help on this would be most appreciated.

[Virtual]

I would personally go down the transition route to Exchange 2007, which involves moving the existing mailboxes to Exchange 2007. I would only look into archiving, if you have an issue with space on the new server. Also, if you are setting up different quotas in Exchange 2007, you may then need to reduce the current mailbox sizes.

OWA users will access their mailbox via https://exch2k7ServerName/OWA. Providing the 2k3 server is still up, Outlook should automatically map to the new serber once the mailbox has been moved and OWA clients still mapping to the old location, should be prompted with the new address, though it would be best to give them the new link.

OWA in 2007 also presents users with a form based authentication logon screen, so some training may be required.

If you search this site and google it, there are some good articles on transitioning to Exchange 2007.