Question

Merging 2 Exchange Servers OR adding a front end server? Need 2 domains to send from the same domain...

Asked by: TJanousek

I'll try to be as detailed as possible.  We have 2 networks (2 companies recently merged) with 2 seperate forests.  One domain is abc the other is xyz.  We have a trust between the 2 Active Directory forests but they are physically seperate.  The exchange servers are also seperate but we do some sharing of address books and calendars.

We are officially merging companies on Jan 1 2007.  Our CEO wants to have our exchange servers send from the same domain abc.com but keeping the domain xyz.com for old contacts until we can fully transition to one company.

Since it's already October and we haven't even begun to consider consolidating to one Active Directory forest, I don't think I want to try that AND move to one Exchange server, do I?

My question is then, what are my other options?  I have a 1 gig private connection between companies so replication lag and speed isn't a concern.  Do I add a third front end Exchange server that routes mail?  Is that do-able and/or difficult?

I'm open to ideas, thanks!

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Asked On
2006-10-10 at 13:34:20ID22019722
Tags

end

,

exchange

,

front

,

server

Topic

Exchange Email Server

Participating Experts
1
Points
250
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: SembeePosted on 2006-10-10 at 15:04:26ID: 17702804

Your options are limited because they aren't in the same forest. A frontend isn't really going to achieve a great deal.

One option would be to move everything to a single Exchange server. By that I mean everything - the email address as well. Remember that you can have as many aliases as you like, so each user could have an email address on both the old and the new domain. It is the default email address that matters, and that is what goes out on the new email messages.

However as you haven't stated what sort of numbers you are looking at, it is difficult to make any recommendations on a suitable method.

Simon.

 

by: TJanousekPosted on 2006-10-11 at 06:53:24ID: 17706850

Sembee thanks for the follow up.  Few questions...

1) Can we have people connect to a seperate Exchange server and stay in another forest?  By that mean wait on going to one forest until next year, but merge the Exchange function by the end of the year?

2) More of a statement than a question.  Company @abc.com is the company I want to have the email domain of.  There are about 450 users and the users coming over are around 125.  So much less work than going the other way.  

3) On the alias command I believe I follow that.  We just add an alias of xyz.com to everyone's email address, change the external DNS records and we go?  But this comes back to my question #1 if that would even work.

 

by: SembeePosted on 2006-10-11 at 08:23:38ID: 17707672

There are certainly ways round the problem.
You could create accounts in the other domain, then use the trust to grant permissions. So the mailboxes would stay in place and the user accounts for authentication would stay in another.
While you cannot have mailboxes without user accounts, there is nothing to stop you from having user accounts for all users in one domain, while their resources (servers, files, computers etc) are in another domain. It is simply a matter of getting the trusts and permissions set correctly.

Simon.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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