Preparing Your Environment

     After you have successfully implemented and deployed your Active Directory on Windows Server 2003 and all your Global Catalog Server are Windows Server 2003, you should then make sure that you have updated your Exchange Server 5.5 with Service Pack 3 or higher. If you have deployed Instant Messaging or Exchange Server 2000 Conferencing you should consider deleting them before you update these servers. They will be replaced with Office Live Communication Server 2003; even Mobile Information Server should be deleted, because now it is built in with Exchange Server 2003; so coexistence is not supported.

     The next step means preparing your Active Directory by implementing the schema update. You have to log on to your domain as Enterprise Administrator and then run setup.exe with the forestprep switch having connectivity to the schema master. After a successful replication the next step is to prepare your domains in your forest using the domainprep switch on one domain controller of each domain logged on as Domain Administrator.

Installing and Configuring Active Directory Connector

     The next step is to install the Active Directory Connector from your Exchange Server 2003 CD in your environment. Then you have to configure the appropriate connection agreements for public and private folders. The account that has to be specified for running the Active Directory Connector should have service account permissions. The import and export process has to be configured using accounts that have the appropriate permissions to read and write to the specified directories. The configuration connection agreement is configured automatically and will make sure that Exchange Server 5.5 directory service will synchronize the complete configuration with Active Directory Services.

     If you have already deployed ADCs Exchange Server 2000 in your environment, you have to upgrade them to Exchange Server 2003 ADC before you can start deploying Exchange Server 2003.

     With the new Exchange Deployment Tool (EXDEPLOY.CHM) that you can find on your Exchange Server 2003 CD it is quite easy to do the migration, because this tool provides a step-by-step guide on the required actions.

The Move Mailboxes Process

     Before you can start the Move Mailbox Procedure using Exchange Deployment Tools or “Active Directory Users and Computers” you should check whether there is a one-to-one relationship between your Accounts and Mailboxes. An easy way to check this automatically is to use the Ntdsattrb.exe tool that can be found on your Exchange Server 2003 CD, too. If so, you should suggest renaming your mailboxes before starting the migration. After a successful migration you can restructure your environment again and perform many-to-many relationships between mailboxes and users.

With Exchange Server 2003 you have a lot of improvements on moving mailboxes, in detail they are:
Rehoming Public Folders

     Rehoming your public folders means that you should replicate them to your new server and then cancel the replication with the old one. This procedure can be done by using Pfmigrate.wsf, too. Don’t forget to replicate your system folders. The pfmigrate script can do the whole procedure in one step using the following switches.

The following command replicates 20 system folders at a time from the source
to the target server:

	c:\pfmigrate.wsf /S: /T: /N:20 /A /SF

The following command deletes the replicated system folders from the source
server:

	c:\Pfmigrate.wsf /S: /T: /N:20 /R /SF
Preparing to Change to Exchange Server 2003 Native Mode

     If there are no more private or public information stores nor connectors on your Exchange Server 5.5 you can start removing the last Exchange Server 5.5 from the your Exchange Server 2003 environment. But before you should start to remove the server you should stop all Exchange Server 5.5 services for some days to make sure you can run your email environment without any Exchange Servers 5.5. If everything works without any trouble you can then start the demotion process.

     Make sure that all Exchange Server 5.5 services are stopped before you delete your Exchange Server 5.5 from your organization. This can be done by starting your Exchange 5.5 administration program and connecting to your Exchange Server 2003 and deleting your Exchange Server 5.5 directory object. After a successful replication of your deletion with Active Directory Connector you will not find any Exchange Server 5.5 objects in your environment anymore. But before you can delete the Active Directory Connector you have to delete the appropriate configuration connection agreement. The last but not least step is now to remove the ADC from your environment and to switch to native Exchange mode. With this step your demotion of Exchange Server 5.5 is being done.