How do you decommission the Exchange Server on a SBS 2008 Server

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Can't turn the server off. It is their one and only :) So a good interim plan would be to disable all Exchange Services for a couple days to make sure Office 365 is working them simply uninstall it? (tools and all)

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I kind of chuckle.... turning off their one and only server, which is used for everything, really can't be considered best practice can it? Seems like the only thing that can be done in the short term is disabling the Exchange Services. The one thing that does need to be done right away is resetting their local copies of Outlook to point to 365. Will that be doable with the Exchange Services disabled so when you add an account in Outlook it won't automatically lock on the the Exchange Server?

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It is their one and only SBS 2008 Server. AD, DHCP, DNS, Storage, the whole nine yards. The autodiscover was the sticking point. Even though there is no autodiscover entry in their local DNS there is an internal one that Outlook will grab on to?

I have seen the entries made to Outlook by Office 365 (when autodiscover works) and it is all greek. If you don't (can't) use autodiscover how do you find the manual settings for Office 365?

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Brian B

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It did. We will be migrating servers in another 4 or 5 months. Mission one is to successfully decommission the Exchange part of the SBS 2008 Server and re-point Outlook on the workstations to O365.....

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As far as I am concerned Exchange can stay there and keep running until it is time to migrate off the SBS 2008 completely. It isn't hurting anything and won't be receiving or sending any emails. The real concern is the ability to manually configure Outlook on the workstations to point to O365. Anyone have a link to those settings?

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That is what I mean by manually configuring Outlook and bypassing autodiscover. That link you posted Tim looks pretty straight forward. Sounds like the safest thing to do might be leave Exchange alone, manually configure Outlook then migrate and shut it off.....

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Kapil Sharma

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Sandeep Kumar

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Sara Teasdale

If you have already done Exchange Migration properly. Plz checkout the following articles

Decommissioning Legacy Exchange Servers
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mspfe/2015/08/26/decommissioning-legacy-exchange-servers/

Decommissioning Exchange Server 2013
https://www.systoolsgroup.com/updates/decommissioning-exchange-server-2013/

Decommission Exchange Server 2013
https://www.netwoven.com/2017/04/13/decommission-exchange-server-2013-2/

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This got very interesting all of a sudden. The manual configuration of Outlook was a 30 second piece of cake and it connected to Office 365 but it didn't last long. As soon as I rebooted the workstation the Outlook settings automatically reverted to the local Exchange Server.

Any ideas?

What version of outlook?