Want to retire your Exchange 2003 servers?

After leaving a site where I have deployed Exchange 2007, often we don't have time to retire the old Exchange Servers. Many poorly documented systems or processes bounce SMTP traffic off these servers. If you retire these too soon, you'll be an unpopular or at least unhappy administrator. Here are the instructions I leave the client with to help them retire the server gracefully:






  1. Make certain Message Tracking is enabled on your Exchange Server
  2. After one week, login to the Exchange 2003 server(s).
  3. Run System Manger. See the illustration:
  4. Select the Message Tracking Center.
  5. Enter a server name of the Exchange 2003 server. You may include more than one server.
  6. Enter the last week as the date range.
  7. Click Find now.
  8. When you double-click the message, you should get a clue what host the message originated from in the Message ID field. If not, you can contact a friendly end user to ask about the message. It may require some detective work, but in my experience it is ALWAYS better to do this work in advance than trying to figure out what broke in a few weeks. For larger organizations this is very important.







When you have made certain your servers are no longer processing mail, you can just turn them off. There isn't any additional work to be done to remove the servers from your Exchange 2007 Organization.

Comments

skibby said…
Greg,

We have an Exchange 2003 Server and we migrated all mail to GMAIL. Now we want to simply decommission from our network. Would simply turning it off be suffice?

I've seen a ton of instructions for how to remove Exchange from AD but I'm thinking that just turning it off is better. No mail is flowing through it and if someone God forbid wanted to retrieve an email from their old email account that was not migrated, then it would be fairly easy to boot up the server and connect to the mail account with Outlook to retrieve an forgotten mail.

Thoughts?

Much appreciated.

Joe
October 3, 2012 at 8:27 AM
Greg Zook said…
Hi Skibby, You can turn it off. Keep in mind that Active Directory has settings that it puts in you Configuration container and on user accounts. This may not be a big deal for you, but you should do a web search and study up on this. As a consultant, I have seen some issues with previous mail system implentations that were gone but showed up in a bad way when implementing Exchange
October 3, 2012 at 3:07 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robocopy Error 31 A device attached to the system is not functioning

I was migrating Windows file shares to NetApp CIFS shares using Robocopy. I was unable to copy owner information or NTFS Security (/COPY:DATSOU) without getting this Error: ERROR 31 (0x0000001F) Copying NTFS Security to Destination Directory F:\PATH A device attached to the system is not functioning. I thought it may be the zone information on may of these files. I used the Sysintenals Streams utility to remove that information. It did not help. In the end, I was forced to copy without NTFS information (/COPY:DATU) When I viewed the properties of any share, folder, or file, the length of time to enumerate and display the permissions was exceedingly slow. I tried disabling anti-virus, etc. In the end, I had to manually re-create the permissions after the initial data copy. File ownership information was lost. UPDATE: I ran a CHKDSK /F and following a reboot this robocopy functioned fine.
Read more

"The following factors also affect the level of access for" user with excess permissions

Image
I have a user that had access to site settings, all content, etc. I double checked her access and it was read only but the permissions check tool showed a panel beneath the site permissions that showed Allow for many categories. She had full control. "The following factors also affect the level of access for" She was added as a Site Collection Administrator. I don't know who would have added her there, but someone had. If you find this type of issue, that should be the first thing you check. You can also check the Web Application User Policy in Central Admin. That's the other area I find people or groups with elevated permissions.
Read more

Unknown server tag 'AdminControls:MigrationToolPromotionTip'. in Central Admin after installing SharePoint 2013 security update KB4482464

I installed KB4482464 on my sandbox server without issue so I moved to my development farm. Following the patch, Central Admin (CA) had an error: Unknown server tag 'AdminControls:MigrationToolPromotionTip'. I noticed that the sandbox environment CA had this banner: You can now use the SharePoint Migration Tool to migrate to OneDrive and SharePoint Online. It looks like that failed in the Dev farm. The Configuration Wizard GUI failed to successfully run. Solution: I ran PSCONFIG with these options on my primary APP server: psconfig.exe -cmd helpcollections -installall -cmd secureresources -cmd services -install -cmd installfeatures -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -wait I ran PSCONFIG with these options on my remaining app, search and WFE servers: psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force I will exclude this update from my deployment on SCCM and run it manually.
Read more