I find it fairly frequent that I have to assist a company redesign or improve their exchange infrastructure. When changing servers around Move Mailbox is a particularly handy tool. There is an absolute dearth of information on the Outlook side of things however. Here is a few things I have found that may be useful.
When you move a mailbox Outlook will (generally) get redirected without issue. It will do this by connecting to the original server, whop will then issue an instruction as to the new mailbox location based on what information is stored in AD. Some (5% or less) will not automatically redirect due to dodgy profiles.
If you have to do a server shuffle due to hardware limitations, that is, move everyone to another server, rebuild the first one, then move them back, you may have problems. As soon as you turn off the original server, any users not yet redirected will not be able to open outlook. Anyone that has already been redirected will be fine. For sites were staff are on rosters this can leave a large number or “orphaned” copies of outlook. Luckily the solution turns out to be simple.
Outlook merely looks at the server name to find the Exchange Server. It’s not based on the computer account or GUID. This means that if you delete the original server and rebuild a temporary one with the same name, it will handle all the redirections for you. It doesn’t matter the mailbox is no longer there, all the data is stored in AD. You could even throw it onto a VM, it doesn’t do any work, and needs very little disk space.
This makes a migration where you want to keep everything smooth for your users even simpler. I just finished using it as I had to to totally reconfigure the RAID packs on a server, meaning the mailboxes just had to move.
Seems fairly retarded to me. I’ve done mailbox migrations without issue in the past, and I’m referring to Exchange 2000. Not a single failure for internally connected systems. They should be able to be pointed to the new server when all the servers are part of the same administrative group, especially.
My concern is with my RPC over HTTP clients. However, I’m pretty sure we’ll have to handle those manually. Ah well, such is the life of an Exchange admin… Running around from computer to computer, like a headless chicken…
In fact, it looks like it will indeed also migrate RPC over HTTP clients seamlessly as well with the exception of the external facing DNS name, unless you are using a front end server of course.
FWIW: I’ve only encountered the redirect issue with clients on Outlook 2003 RTM.