Exchange Exchange

Hello gentleman, we are currently underground preparations of moving from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to 2007. This will be our first migration of such scope. I wanted to check with those who have had experience with such a project. What type of pitfalls should we watch out for during the migration?
We will keep our servers on windows 2003 for the time being.

From my understanding one of the most important aspects of exchange 2007 over 2003 would be unlimited store space, and replication. (Correct me if I am wrong)



Thank you for your feedback, greatly appreciated.

Exchange 2007 doesn't have unlimited storage space, it can be argued that it can more easily handle larger mailboxes however. It can do this because, with the right memory configuration have a lower disk I/O requirement and with LCR, CCR and SCR having two (or more) copies of the database available should reduce the number of full backups that need to be completed.

As for pitfalls and problems, just be sure to size your servers correctly and to fully test autodiscover before you start your client rollout to make sure you have a smooth transistion.

We are also preparing to migrate from 2003 to 2007.

We manage users and mailboxes on our existing Exchange 2003 programaticly from a Linux server (C code and postgres database).
User acounts are created on Active Directory using LDAP from the Linux server. To create a mailbox the required attributes are set on AD, which then creates the mailbox on Exchange 2003. No direct communication between the Linux server and Exchange 2003.

For Exchange 2007 I understand that this cannot be done anymore. Correct?

How would you suggest we implement mailbox create / management on Exchange 2007 programaticly from Linux?

Web service on the Exchange server?

Example of webserive call to powershell commands?

You can call PowerShell cmdlets through .NET easily. Vivek posted some information about doing this awhile back. It should be able to get you started. If you are able to do some development on the Windows side anyway. Also I wrote a chapter on how to do this (with some examples) in the Professional PowerShell for Exchange Server 2007 SP1 book.

Otherwise you could run a reoccuring PowerShell Script on the Windows box that looks for a CSV file (or similar) that is generated by the Linux server and processes user add/delete/updates.