exchange 2003 - Building a New Active Directory and moving from Old Domain

I am in the midst of building a new Active Directory 2008 Domain. My organization is currently running on a AD2000 and the decision has been made to build a new AD instead of migrate our current AD to 2008 ADDS. We have an Exchange 2003 infrastructure and Team Foundation/Sharepoint server that are in the 2000 AD environment. I know the easiest route is to migrate up but the current AD was not built correctly and is having problems. For this reason the powers that be decided to build a new AD.

I know ADMT is one tool that I will need for this project but what other tools, resources, and books/articles can you suggest for such a project especially for moving Exchange from the old Domain to the New?

Answer

I'd encourage you to re-think the whole "rebuild" idea. There's nothing in the current AD domain that can't be "fixed" by migrating and cleaning it up.

If your decide that you have to rebuild it, you're going to need to do a PST migration of Exchange (since you're running on Exchange 2003 and can't do a cross-forest mailbox move).

Basically, this involves using ExMerge to export all the contents of the original Exchange Information Store to PST files. After you've created the new AD and new user accounts (either using ADMT or "by hand"), you'll import those PSTs back into the new Exchange IS. Finally, you'll need to use something like ADSIEDIT or a script to add an X500 address proxy to each user account that matches the "legacyExchangeDN" attribute that was assigned to their user accounts in the old domain to insure that replies to imported emails function properly (see http://blogs.technet.com/sbs/archive/2009/05/21/cannot-reply-to-old-emails-or-modify-old-calendar-items-after-pst-mail-migration.aspx for details).

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Again: Re-think doing this "rebuild" versus migration. Acouple of hours with a competent AD consultant would be all you'd need to idenfity the problems in the current domain and plan for "fixes" as you upgrade to W2K8. You wouldn't need to go thru any of these gyrations with your email and you'll end up spending less time and money for what amounts to a cleaner, better solution.