Limited/staged exchange deployment? Am I insane?

[cameramonkey]

As most here, we are a midsized company (600 users)with a limited budget. For the past 8-10 years, we have been growing as we run our mail on cobalt Raq servers. When we upgraded our Raq4 5 years ago, we found out the hard way that the Raq550 interface for the mailing lists is a nightmare to use, so we split out our list server and mailbox server roles within 48 hours of the original move by leaving the lists on the old server and creating an alias subdomain (list@lists.domain.com) that points to the old server.

Fast forward to today. We have that ancient Raq4 still running JUST the majordomo lists, and its not only painfully slow (all day to distribute a message if somebody emails a large attachment to the entire org) I am just waiting for that ancient box to melt into a pile of goo due to its extreme age. Our current mailbox server is a new-ish BlueQuartz box which does ok. Its not great, but it works for what it is designed to do.

We have a quote to update the front end on our BQ server to make the list server useable again, but I felt that the thousands of dollars they are charging would be better spent migrating to Exchange.

My idea was to deploy exchange with a limited number of CALs for testing, but primarily to use it to replace the distribution groups (which don’t count against CALs). To begin with, existing outlook users would not change settings and would continue to access the current SMTP/POP server. The exchange server would use distribution groups and distribute to the current SMTP server, but would not house any mailboxes (except the limited number of test boxes). (also our AD FQDN and usernames do not match our real email addresses)

Eventually we would purchase the other CALs and move the users from standalone POP/SMTP to exchange entirely.

Here is the big question:

Can this be done relatively easily? Am I insane for trying anything but a full blown exchange migration (mailboxes and all)?

-Any ideas on the best way to do this without breaking the bank and going full-on?
-Should I install Exchange in my mail AD domain?
-Should I install in a new domain in the same forest to isolate it, and then move to the main domain when we go full-on?

/My brain hurts.

 

[58sniper]

midsized company (600 users)

Everyone has a different definition of midized...

use it to replace the distribution groups (which don't count against CALs).

True, but what objects are you putting into the DLs? And if Exchange is going to be processing mail for yourdomain.com, how are you going to handle mailflow to mailboxes that sit on non-Exchange servers? Some planning needs to happen here. If this is for DLs for the internal org, move the whole org to Exchange and be done with it.

also our AD FQDN and usernames do not match our real email addresses

irrelevant, really.

-Any ideas on the best way to do this without breaking the bank and going full-on?

lab it out in Hyper-V or VMWare and kick the tires.

And before someone else mentions it, I'll say it. Bring in a consultant to do the design/implementation.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/