The Exchange 2007 server needed to be rebuilt. The BES was all migrated and ready to go. The new server was prepped. No real test environment available, but enough scenarios gone through. The time to Migrate to Exchange 2010.

Over this past weekend, I got the Exchange migration project nearly completed. Friday, I spent the afternoon making sure I had prepped the new server properly. That all the roles needed were installed, and that the system was patched. It came to be 4:30 pm and I started the procedures as I had planned. Changed the IP on the old Exchange Server to an open Internal. Changed the IP on the new Exchange server, to the old one’s IP so that I didn’t need to make any firewall changes. Changed their entries in DNS, and made sure it took. Then Migrated my Mailbox, and tested, and Outlook wouldn’t connect. Checked my settings on the Hub Transport, and found I didn’t have a few boxes checked. Checked the appropriate boxes, and Outlook worked. Tested Internal and External E-mail. External worked just fine. Internal, well, I wasn’t getting any e-mail from people that had not been migrated to the new server. Not a big deal, as I migrated the helpdesk tech’s e-mail and tested locally. That worked. So Exchange 2010 could e-mail to people on the 2007 server, but 2007 could not e-mail to the 2010 server. Still not a big deal. So I migrated all the boxes over the weekend.

While that was happening, I made my adjustments to OWA, Active Sync and made sure the Blackberry’s would still get e-mail, along with the Android phones. By Sunday afternoon, all the mailboxes had been moved over, and I had started on working on getting the Public Folders back up and running on the 2007 server so I could replicate them over and be finished with it all. The bad thing when a migration is going smooth, is that one can become complacent. Sure enough, the Public Folder Hierarchy would not populate on the 2010 server. Nothing that was on the 2007 server, none of the folders were showing. Houston we have a minor problem. I went to bed, waiting to see if it was just taking a long time to propagate.

Walk into the office on Monday, sure enough everything is working just fine, except the Public Folders had not been replicated yet. I know it is because Exchange 2007 can’t e-mail to Exchange 2010. So I continue looking for the answer to this issue, but outside of that, the migration was pretty painless.