At work I started off an exchange 2007 migration which has been long overdue. In the hope of providing some insight into migrations that others may still have to do, here are some notes.
Combining the CAS & Mailbox roles prevents OWA proxying
If like me you start off your Exchange migration by just adding a CAS role on a new Exchange 2007 server you’ll notice that it’ll proxy the webmail requests for your 2003 servers.
If you decide to add the mailbox role to that server, it stops doing that and just redirects clients. That’s fine internally, but if you have external people trying to access webmail it’ll just send them to https://exchange2003.nwtraders.local/exchange/
Microsoft have a workaround, which is simply deploying a standalone CAS role. Not a possibility for me, so my only option is to have two seperate OWA URLs.
Migrating AutoAccept sink resources to Exchange 2007 Rooms & Resources
Microsoft implemented booking in Exchaneg 2007, which i’m ecstatic about (no, i’m not being sarcastic). To migrate your legacy resources move the mailbox, and then run the following:
Set-Mailbox -Identity ConferenceRoom1 -Type Room Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -Identity ConferenceRoom1 -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept
For more infromation, see here.
Annoying things they missed
Nothing’s perfect, but if Microsoft could add the followign in a patch/service pack i’d love them forever.
- Powershell cmdlet to manage calendar permissions – at present, you have to give yourself permissions to the mailbox, open it and set the calendar permissions. Yawn.
- Functionality to set default document favourites – Documents in OWA 2007 is great! but, with a non-technical staff it’d be nice to provide some common shares (their home directory for example) and perhaps our general document store
[...] that i’m well udner way with my Exchange 2007 migration I figured it’d be a good time to test the new Exchange recovery [...]