Exchange 2000 to 2003 with parrallel domain move? Need expert advise.

[theprimemover]

I'm going to be restructuring the domains in our company, and in the process, going form win2k to win2k3 AD. I currently have Exchange 2000 deployed in 3 different domains that operate independantly of each other. As part of the 2k3 migration, I need to move these servers to the new domain, and would like to upgrade them to Exchagne 2k3 at the same time.

Changing the domain name on an E2k server is not supported, nor could I make it work. I could upgrade the E2k server's in place, but then how do I get the databases to mount in a new domain? I've tried this in a lab and not had much success due to the change in Administrative Group name and Org name.

I prefer not to do an EXMerge move between the mail servers, as this will significantly increase the size of my databases, which are already large. Is there anyone here that can help me with ideas, or alternatives to pursue?

Is there perhaps a 3rd party product that could help?

Thanks in advance for any help.

James

 

[jwatnuv]

You can do a migration. There are plenty of tools for this or you can use the tools that come with Exchange 2003. Biggest hitch with it though is that you'll need new hardware or different hardware to do this. You can setup Exc2K3 on the new hardware in a different ORG then migrate your data to it. Microsoft's official term for it is Inter-Organizational migration. I've done this in a test environment and it worked pretty well. Biggest hitch is with the public folders using the pfMigate script.

Hope this helps...