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wvumountie

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Company splitting best email solution

I have researched this question, I have found a lot of posts, but none that are exactly like my situation.

So here goes:

I have one domain, several DC's and one exchange server.  Our company recently sold, I am staying with old owners and rest of the IT staff is going with the new company.  The new company is taking over 75% of employees.  I am keeping the domain name, but new company will own all of the servers at split time.

I want to rebuild the domain from scratch, however, my main concern is downtime on email.  I am not sure that I can migrate 150 users over a weekend to a new domain by myself.  I would prefer a slower more methodical way to do this.

Here is my proposed solution.

Create a new domain, build a trust with old domain, have a secondary exchange server buit as if I were doing the swing technique to upgrade server hardware on the exchange box.  Then bring the new exchange server over to the new domain.

If someone has a better solution please let me know, or if you believe this will not work.  Thanks
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Mestha
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It very much depends if there is going to be a hard cut off. If there is, then you could have a hard job on your hands.

What you cannot do is pick up an Exchange server from one forest and put it in to another. Exchange doesn't accept that. To split the data up you are going to have to migrate the data across, usually by extracting it via EXMERGE and then importing it using the same.

There are various techniques to have both servers working with email going to same domain, but as you haven't said which versions you are using, there is little point me posting links.

Simon.
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wvumountie

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I am currently on exchange 2003, when I migrate I plan to go to 2007.  So there are various techniques to have two mail servers on different domains receiving email for the same email domain?
If you have two servers on different forests working with email for the same EMAIL domain then you are sharing the SMTP Address space.

Exchange 2003: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321721
Exchange 2007: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676395.aspx

Simon.
This should work with Exchange 2003 as the "primary" box, and 2007 as the shared namespace box.  it looks like the only thing I would need to do on the 2007 machine would be to configure the the recipient policy.  It looks like all the work is done on the primary box.  Is that what you think?
You have to look at the email flow both ways - so how email gets from a sender on server 2 back to server 1. So while the majority of the work is done on the primary system, there is some work to be done on the secondary.

You have to be careful, as I have seen people cause email loops.

Simon.
Ahh, I follow however dont see in the article how to do that.  If i set the shared name space up on server2 then I can easily see how a loop is created.
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that makes sense just to use the contacts.  

so the second server would only be a dummy domain?  when i want to sever the connection between primary and secondary server would I just create a new recipient policy with the real domain?

i suppose if I start out with the real domain name on both servers, thats were the routing becomes an issue.
As long as neither WINDOWS domain matches the real domain, you will have no problem replacing/updating the Recipient Policy.

Simon.
my current domain is exactly that of my email domain.  I also need to come up with a new domain name for my new domain, ideally it needs to be the same as my internet domain name.  But I dont see how that is possible.   Also since my windows domain is the same as my internet domain you say I will have Problems replacing my recipient policy.  Do you know of a work around?
The WINDOWS domain and the EMAIL domain can be different things.
In fact many would encourage that.
The only thing you have to watch for is that the WINDOWS domain is in the default recipient policy and is set as an email address on each user. It does not have to be the default email address.

Therefore you could have two email address:

john.smith@example.com (default address).
john.smith@example.local

Therefore what I would do is use a completely different domain for the WINDOWS domain, unrelated to either the INTERNET domain or the original WINDOWS domain. That could be a .local or another variant of a registered domain name.

Simon.