Exchange 5.5 upgrade to [better] 3rd Party Server

[BirdNerd]

Hello...

I'm a consultant who made a recommendation to a client that they really need to upgrade their 6-year-old email server running Exchange 5.5. They asked me for recommendations. I did some research [they have at least one client of their own who is wanting web mail with remote admin functionality - I know OWA does not provide this at all] - and recommended 2 products of which one was IMail. They chose IMail and asked me to perform the migration and all the necessary thaings for this. I have not gotten my hands "dirty" on something like this in a really long time...

This client I made the recommendation to is a very small hosting operation of some custom database applications hosting a few web sites and providing at least 10 domains with web and email services. Against my better judgement, I am put into a position to perform this service (money crisis, politics, etc). I've never done a migration of an Exchange Server... and will be starting this task Monday afternoon. I'm not totally ignorant; I'm well-versed in DNS, networking, etc - just not up on e-mail server migration. I've been living in the big-picture world on the executive side for a few years and am a bit rusty - though I did setup my own linux box with mail forwarding last year, not too difficult...

Primarily what I'm looking for is some insight, pointers, failure paths, and some guidelines. I'm asking for a bit of help and hopefully I won't have a horror story to reflect upon in the future. What am I getting into??? Any advice, best practices, guidance - anything would be helpful...

THANKS!

 

[zbnet]

Sounds like you've blagged your way into a situation here. Have you considered subcontracting your problem? Last thing you want to do is mess it up. If you have no experience of Exchange you might find it more complex than you anticipated.

 

[CaptainStorm]

Do you have an idea how your going to migrate the data from the information store to this imail system? Does imail have exchange import tools? Can imail read in PST files to new user mail boxes?

IF not then it would seem you have to take each users mail out to a PST file and then keep your clients in outlook with their PSTs and just start having them get new mail from the imail system via pop.

Seems like in order to do this you would have to know exchange and imail both pretty well.

I would subcontract this if I were you!

Storm

 

[weshot]

have your client considered EXCH2003 ? it provide several good improvement address what 5.5 shorts, but even migrate between EXCHs could be tricky, since your client hosting 10 domains and their e-mail services, non-interruption of the service is improtant.

I suggest you simulate/practice the migration in a lab offline before the live convert.

 

[baddos]

Imail is good for the ISP area. It provides remote admin on a per domain level and/or per server level. However, to migrate mailboxes, you'll have to use Exmerge to extract the emails.

You'll then use outlook to import the emails into the user's IMAP folders (if you use IMAP). If you just use POP3 for them, then have their outlook client just use the .PST that Exmerge created.


I wouldn't use Imail as an internal email system. Exchange has way more features than Imail. However, if you are hosting websites for other people and need to delegate that control, then use Imail.