Win2K Exchange sever for outlook

[chrisdown]

At present am running an office email system with 24 users called 'Officetalk' with our Win2K Small business server. One client is the gateway to the router and the database used on the server for 'Officetalk' is Sybase.

We would like to migrate data and use exchange server and outlook as clients, how easy is this ? Can I run both systems side by side during changeover.

Any advice

 

[MikeNH]

Microsoft has some migration tools, but mainly for their big competitors, such as Lotus Notes. Believe there is one for Sendmail.

I have done 2 Exchange migrations from Unix systems and in both cases found it easier to start from scratch. Sometimes you end-up with more problems then its worth.

I tried running both old and new mail systems side-by-side, but had a difficult time in the end since both servers were trying to share a similiar namespace setup.

What I did to bring over the users mail was to start having the clients use Outlook setup to use POP3 (pointing to old server). When Exchange was up and running I exported their current Outlook mail to a .pst file, changed the configuration of Outlook from POP3 to Corporate Mail (Exchange) and then imported the .pst back into Outlook. Then all previous mail, tasks, contacts, appointments will be copied to the Exchange server.

**One big suggestion first. Make sure your clients and the Exchange server are protected by a good anti-virus package before Outlook begins to talk with Exchange. Resident viruses on a workstation or in email that were harmless because you were not running Outlook, will suddenly starting partying. Scan the workstation and saved email prior to configuring Outlook to Exchange. I have seen Exchange go down (even with protection), from not having done a good virus sweep on the workstation first.

Good luck.