Chapter 12: Coexisting with and Upgrading from Exchange 2000 Server

We examined in Chapter 11, ‚“Coexisting with and Migrating from Exchange 5.5, ‚½ the difficulties and problems that go along with coexisting and migrating from Exchange Server 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003. Fortunately, the road from Exchange 2000 Server to Exchange Server 2003 is not nearly as bumpy. The existence of user objects within Active Directory and the familiar Exchange organization greatly help in making this scenario a much easier one to deal with, even for the relatively inexperienced Exchange administrator. In this chapter will examine the coexistence with and upgrading from Exchange 2000 Server to Exchange Server 2003. It ‚ s not as easy as simply upgrading Exchange in place, but it ‚ s not too difficult either.

Improvements in Exchange Server 2003

Although we ‚ ve been discussing the improvements and changes in Exchange Server 2003 all through the book up to this point, it ‚ s important to review and summarize them again. These are likely some of the answers that you will provide when asked the question, ‚“Why should we upgrade to Exchange Server 2003? ‚½

Increased availability Exchange Server 2003 supports up to eight-node active/passive clusters when running on Windows Server 2003. Exchange 2000 Server supported only four-node active/passive clusters, while Exchange Server 5.5 could support only two-node clusters. As well, the failover response times in Exchange Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 have been greatly improved to provide the best possible fault-tolerant, highly available solution.

Enhanced backup and recovery Exchange Server 2003 takes advantage of the new volume shadow copy feature of Windows Server 2003 ‚ s ntbackup.exe , which allows for open files to be backed up as if they were closed at the time of the backup operation. In addition, Exchange Server 2003 provides new recovery functionality in the Mailbox Recovery Center and the Recovery Storage Group.

Performance Exchange Server 2003 provides enhanced public folder replication, distribution list caching, and the ability to suppress Out of Office messages from being sent to distribution lists. When used with Outlook 2003, Exchange Server 2003 offers many improvements in messaging, including cache mode of operation and improved synchronization.

Security Exchange Server 2003 supports many security enhancements, including using IPSec between front- and back-end servers, Kerberos authentication between front- and back-end servers, and improvements in the security stance of IIS 6.0, to name a few. Exchange Server 2003 also offers security enhancements over previous versions by restricting the ability to send messages to distribution lists to authenticated users, providing real-time safe and block lists for inbound messages, inbound recipient filtering, and attachment blocking in Outlook and OWA.

User experience Exchange Server 2003 Outlook Web Access offers many feature and security improvements over all previous versions and almost mirrors Outlook 2003 feature by feature. When used with Exchange Server 2003, Outlook 2003 provides for MAPI compression for faster synchronization. Exchange Server 2003 also provides support for cHTML, xHTML, and HTML for mobile phones and PDAs.

Management and deployment Exchange Server 2003 provides 1,700 events for use with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) for superior enterprisewide monitoring and management. As well, the new Internet Mail Connection Wizard greatly simplifies the daunting task of enabling your Exchange organization to send and receive mail from the Internet. The Exchange Task Wizard provides a quick and easy way to move multiple mailboxes at the same time and offers the ability to schedule the move for a later time.