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How to decommission the only Exchange 2003 server

We would like to decommission an Exchange 2003 server. The server in question is the one and only Exchange 2003 server on a 2003 domain infrastructure. There are 2 other DC’s which are 2012, and will be used to fully upgrade the domain to 2012 at a later date.

E-mail has recently been migrated to 365 hosted e-mail with AD integration through DirSync.

All mailboxes have been deleted with the ‘SMTP’ and ‘System Attendant’ entries remaining (see attached screenshot - Exchange Mailboxes).

When I attempting to uninstall Exchange through the ‘Microsoft Exchange Wizard’ I receive an error indicating that ‘One or more users currently use a mailbox store on the server’ (see attached screenshot - Microsoft Exchange Installation Wizard).

In AD, there are a number of Exchange items that have e-mail addresses associated with them, but I assume that these will be removed when the Exchange installation is complete (see attached screenshot - Exchange AD Items)

Can anyone provide step by step instructions on how to decommission and remove the Exchange 2003 server from the domain?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Simon Butler (Sembee)

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Excellent, thanks for the link. It turned out that 6 user accounts had Exchange Attributes associated with them. Once the accounts were identified using the search parameters as described in the link, I simply right clicked on them and selected 'remove Exchange Attributes'.

Thanks