Merging our domain and exchange 2003 into a new company's forest

[JordanCN2]

Our company was recently purchase by another and they want to merge our exchange server into their domain so we will all be on the central GAL and we can have access to each other's calendars. We have a single 2003 domain "mydomain.com" and a single Exchange 2003 server. They have a forest of:

a.company.com
b.company.com
c.company.com

I do not know how many exchange servers

Since our company is (was) a small company with a good Exchange 2003 server with a lot of space we did not limit our user mail. Some have several gigs of mail and I want to do what I can to see that they continue to operate with as few limits as possible and not be restricted to the new companies 250 MB standard. I do not want to look like we are resisting integration.

I want to propose keeping our exchange server up and to continue to let our division's employees operate with higher limits on storage. But I also want to be sure that we are on the corporate GAL and are able to give and get access to calendars of the other companies. What strategy will give me the best of both?

 

[TheMisio]

JordanCN2,

There are at least two viable scenarios for your situation (the third one although valid, very expensive):

1. Synchronise all GALs using Galsync (IIFP) server. Plenty of info out there. Use free / busy to share the free / busy information across trusts. This will however be limited to just that: free or busy. You will not be able to connect to someone else’s calendar using your mail client. You can view someone’s calendar using OWA of that’s person’s mailbox though.

However, as your systems will be consolidate sooner or later, all this effort to achieve that may not be justified.

2. Create a separate Exchange databases (could be within their own Storage Group) on the company.com system and create a separate limits policy (which conforms to your current size limits). Assign that policy to the databases you’ve created and migrate users and their mailboxes over to the company.com organisation. As I suspect this will happen anyway. At least this way you will have enough time to get users to archive their mail data and thus reduce the size of their mailboxes. Any user’s mailbox which has been stripped down to below 250 MB can be moved over to the database with 250 MB limit policy.

3. Upgrade both Exchange systems to Exchange 2010 which allows calendar sharing.

Hope that helps.

Michael.

 

[58sniper]

Since our company is (was) a small company with a good Exchange 2003 server with a lot of space we did not limit our user mail

This is asking for trouble. You should ALWAYS have limits - even if they are arbitrarily high. This will help stop mail loops and other problems, and can prevent databases from dismounting when the volume runs out of space.

If the parent company is running on a newer version of Exchange, there is certainly a reason to migrate to that solution.

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