Migrating Mailboxes from an Exchange Server 5.5 Organization to a Separate Exchange 2000 or Exchange Server 2003 Organization

In Exchange 2000 Server Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Exchange Server 2003, you can use Migration Wizard to migrate mailboxes from an Exchange Server 5.5 organization to a separate Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 organization. With this migration process, you can design a new Exchange Server topology.

To use this migration approach, you must make sure that the server running Exchange Server 5.5 is on an external domain. (However, the source Exchange Server 5.5 organization can be located in the same forest as the target Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 organization, as long as the source Exchange Server 5.5 organization is not joined to the Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 organization and has a different organization name.)

Exchange Server 5.5 and later do not share permissions, directories, or public folders. Therefore, you must re-create these items manually after the migration process.

The migration from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 is included as an additional migration path in Migration Wizard. You can use Exchange Server 5.5 migration functionality to:

• Extract directory information using Active Directory Service Interfaces to perform a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) search.
• Provide a user interface for common functions such as selecting accounts, servers, and containers.
• Search for matches between migrated mailboxes and user objects based on the security identifier (SID) and X.500 address.
• Create user objects in Microsoft Active Directory directory service.
• Merge contact directory information with user object attributes, and then delete contacts.
• Activate mailboxes on Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003.
• Use MAPI to connect to the Exchange mailboxes to read mailbox content from the Exchange Server 5.5 mailbox and write it to the Exchange 2000 or Exchange 2003 mailbox.
• Extract items from the source mailbox during migration

When migrating Exchange Server 5.5 mailboxes, Migration Wizard copies directory and mailbox information from the server running Exchange Server 5.5 on the external domain (source) to the Microsoft Windows 2000 forest (target). The steps that Migration Wizard performs to do these tasks are based on Active Directory searches.

Migration Wizard searches Active Directory for user objects with Windows SIDs matching the SIDs associated with the Exchange Server 5.5 mailboxes selected for migration. For each SID not found in Active Directory, Migration Wizard creates a disabled user object that corresponds to the account that you are migrating.

REFERENCES

For complete details about how to run Migration Wizard, see the Exchange 2000 Server SP1 online documentation. To see this documentation, visit the following Microsoft Web site: For additional information about how to install Exchange 2000 Server into an existing Exchange 5.5 organization, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: