Exchange 5.5 to 2003 migration question

[Sleighbor]

Hello all,

I am writing up a project plan for our 5.5 to 2003 migration. 75% of our users log into our Windows 2003 AD and the other 25% into an NT 4.0 domain with a trust between the two. We have a single exchange org. The bosses want to go to Exchange 2003 before they finish migrating the users off of the NT 4.0 domain.

So my question is this:
Do I run ADMT to migrate the user accounts from the NT 4.0 domain firt, migrating SID History with it?
Then run the ADC against the whole W2K3 AD or just against the OU that I migrate the users into?

Any help/insight would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Kevin

 

[jpm121]

I'm pretty sure the ADC will do what the ADMT does plus move all the exchange stuff -- from what I've seen in there it creates AD user accounts and will initialize passwords, etc. I can't answer for sure since we did the ADMT thing first, several months before the Exchange upgrade started, but we do have some stragglers still running on the NT 4 domain.

On the Exchange 2003 Microsoft site there are some really good document packages on how to do the migration. I suggest you take a look; there are several different options on how to go.

 

[Sleighbor]

Hi jpm,

Thanks for the input. I was reading all of Microsoft's docs this afternoon after posting this. They say I could either run ADMT first to clone the NT 4.0 accounts and then the ADC will find a match for all the mailboxes in 5.5 or I could just run the ADC. It will create the disable accounts for these users to act as placeholders and then when we get around to migrating the user accounts later on we would then run an ADClean to merge the two accounts. I'm thinking using the ADC might be the way to go.

Thanks again,
Kevin

 

[lanceja]

We are in the process of moving our users from 5.5 to 2003. We setup our accounts in the AD and then used the ADC to move their mailboxes.

The only problem that we have run into is one user having more than one mailbox in the 5.5 server. AD will only allow you to have one mailbox/user.

Just be watching for that and you should have no problem.

Good luck

 

[Sleighbor]

Hey lanceja,

After sleeping on it I decided to not use the ADMT and instead go right to using the ADC. I will run the NTDSNoMatch utility before hand to deal with all resource mailboxes. After I am done with the mail migration we will use the AD Cleanup Wizard to merge the disabled ADC accounts with the new user accounts when we migrate people off of NT 4.0.

Thank you for your input,
Kevin