MCITP: Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Messaging Design and Deployment: Study Guide

Chapter 7. Planning a Migration to Exchange Server 2007

Whether you have a single Exchange server in your organization or thousands of servers across different geographical locations, the first step before you upgrade or migrate to Exchange 2007 is to perform an organization-wide assessment. In my own experience, for a medium to large organization, this assessment process usually takes anywhere from two to six weeks as you gather and analyze the information about your current network, Active Directory sites, Active Directory topology, user data, mailbox restrictions, mailbox policies, routing groups, administrative groups, SMTP connectors, foreign connectors, backup strategy, security information, Outlook Web Access, and more. All planning steps should be taken carefully before migrating from a legacy Exchange environment to Exchange 2007. Business author Brian Tracy estimates that one minute on planning and organizing your deployment will save you five minutes during execution and implementation, which means you get a full 500 percent return on your planning during the implementation phase.

Like Exchange 2000 and Exchange Server 2003, Exchange Server 2007 also depends on Active Directory to store configuration information, recipient information, distribution lists, custom recipients, Exchange organization data, and information about other resources. You must communicate with the Active ...