Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008

A trip to Ireland the other week for an email deployment took longer than I expected. No time on site to see what was happening and no project management time meant that the deployment was a “Turn up and do it” style.

 

Existing site: Single SBS 2003 domain, circa 30 users, mixture of local desktop and remote laptop.

Required outcome: Integrate to new domain accessed over VPN. Use existing hardware for DC and file and print. Deploy new Exchange 2007 into existing org and move mailboxes.

 

Gotchas:

VPN issues meant we could not get domain connectivity or move schema master to local box.

I had not had sufficient experience with 2008 Server.

.Net 3.5 on 2008 means decidedly unhelpful errors with Exchange 2007. In addition to the other installations, use ServerManagerCmd -i net-framework

 

Notes to the wise:

Read your notes and don’t guess.

Deploy .Net Framework 3.0 despite Exchange saying it has a .Net installation and is happy. It isn’t.

 

Four days including travel both ways. Migration complete and users happy including a load of client side updates and use of my spring clean document. In isolation I would probably have had more trouble but I was part of a team of 3 people doing the work and had help very late on Sunday evening from Nathan Winters as I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Installing Exchange 2007 into an organisation is fairly straight forward. Doing it on a site you have never visited into an org you don’t know and to a deadline is enough to give you a nosebleed.

 

I didn’t even get any Guinness.