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Huge project coming up.

We currently have our email hosted in the cloud. All users have Outlook 2010 installed on their desktop computers with outlook pointed to the hosted exchange address.

We now currently have a New Exchange 2013 server in house as we will now be hosting our own mail.

Once the mailbox migration is complete and the DNS records are pointing to the proper server will I be able to just switch the server name to direct the profile to the new server or will we need to recreate profiles for each user?

We are hoping to be able to just change the address if possible because people have multiple mailboxes.

Any help will be greatly appreciated :-)

Thanks in advance

Bobby S
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  • That depends a lot on your setup and on how the migration is being done. Are the two Exchanges even in the same AD forest? – Massimo Aug 16 '16 at 21:37

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Tools to combine: logon scripts, powershell, AD group membership, Group Policy, VBA, DNS helpers, Microsoft deployment tools.

Leverage DNS helpers and have logon script test for existence of a profile for the new server. If it doesn't exist, create it. Have it name the profile in a specific way so that you can test for it. Check Office deployment tools for how to do this. This is especially helpful if you have users who move from machine to machine or if you have a lot of new users on a frequent basis.

Jeter-work
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If your domain name is set up properly, then yes, you'll be able to transition without recreating the profiles. You want your autodiscover record (autodiscover.domainname.com) to be what updates the location. With autodiscover, Outlook pulls in the correct settings. This is what allows hosted servers to change server names all the time and do farm migrations without the end users knowing.

You'll need Mailflow, Split Domain, the new MX Records added as lower priority than your current MX records (so later you can swap them) and then change where your autodiscover record is pointing. Make sure you have all of your firewall policies in place to allow autodiscover and activesync to work properly into the exchange server (set up a test domain and test the crap out of it) and use the Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover and ActiveSync test tools on the web to test for proper configuration.

Once the test environment works for the flowing of connectivty through the firewall, then you know that the transition should work just fine.

As for the additional mailboxes, rather than configure them for multiple mailboxes, you can just grant their main account Full Access permissions to the secondary mailboxes and they can pull them up right in outlook as a secondary mailbox. Will look and feel the same, but the permissions are based on their main user account. Easier when someone gets their access restricted from such a situation because then you just revoke their permissions as opposed to having to get on to their system to remove the additional account.

JustALittleITGuy
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You can have some success with repairing Outlook to also reset the profile but you would be better off removing the profiles and recreating them automatically using ZeroConfigExchange - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/outlooking/2015/10/30/zeroconfigexchange-automating-the-creation-of-an-outlook-profile-for-exchange-online-accounts-and-exchange-on-premises-environments/

Edit: if the users have full access to shared mailboxes they will automatically be added to the new profile as well.

smwk
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