Talking Out Loud with ASB

Good Ol' Microsoft Fun with Exchange 2007

So, I sort of completed the migration to Exchange 2007 that I had decided to do this weekend.  Sort of.

The mailbox moves were flawless.  Total time for this part of the migration was about 15 minutes, with my mailbox being the longest at 6 minutes.  Unfortunately for me, that was just the tip of the iceberg.  I have a ton of public folders -- of the mail-enabled variety -- that I use to subscribe to mailing lists.  I also have another mail server that handles my internally run mailing lists and auto-responders, of which I have about 5 of each. 

These two aspects of my mail infrastructure require a bit more configuration than your garden variety Exchange installation at home.  There's a lot in Exchange 2007 to like, and in fairness, I'm going to need to read some more documentation before I can give a true assessment of the product.  Until that time, however, there are some general gripes that I'd like to address right now.

As I mentioned, the migration of the mailboxes was just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm still trying to get my public folders replicated from the 2003 server to the 2007 server, but without much success.  You see, Microsoft brilliantly decided that supporting public folders with a GUI is passe for 2007, so they only provided command-line options for managing this deprecated functionality.  (Was it too much to ask that they provide the stupid GUI and deprecate the functionality starting NOW, so that people can migrate cleanly, and then have until the next version to make alternate arrangements for the obsolete functionality?  Migrations are hard enough without being forced to the the familiar in the most complicated way possible)   The other fun fact is that the Exchange Management Console (EMC) in 2007 is completely different from the Exchange System Manager (ESM) interface in 2003 and earlier.  And I do mean "completely different". I don't think I can remember a Microsoft GUI changing as drastically between versions as this, and given the recent release of Windows Vista and Office 2007, with which I am fairly familar, that's saying a whole lot.

They've changed the names of various options, their overall location, the extent of their functionality, and their ability to be accessed via the GUI.   I can't tell you how much fun I've had looking at my Exchange org via ESM v6.5 (2003), seeing a particular option that I know I want/need to alter, and being told that this can only be done with ESM 8.0 or higher.  Except, there's no ESM 8.0.  The EMC in 2007 doesn't appear to provide the same level of access to certain items, and the ones that it does provide are named different and handled in a different way.  (For instance, to handle my aforementioned split SMTP name space in 2003, I used the following knowledgebase article, which was entitled so that you knew what was going on.  It's not nearly the same way in 2007, and the naming convention is ambiguous.)

Another fun fact was that my Public Folder had aliases that were not acceptable to 2007 because of some of the characters they contained, but they worked perfectly fine in 2003 for the past 3 years.  One of the forbidden characters, btw, is the venerable SPACE.   I discovered this by using the Get-MailPublicFolder cmdlet from the Exchange Management Shell (which is really PowerShell for Exchange).  It's great that Exchange management can finally be scripted, but you'd think they'd make it easier to migrate and co-exist with legacy Exchange servers. 

Sometime this week, I'll try to figure out why the Public Folder replication is still not working.  I have 652 messages relating to the replication queued up in the OLD-to-NEW server routing connector that was created when I installed Exchange 2007.  I do have to say that the installation routine is much improved over the old method, but this loss of functionality regarding Public Folders is highly disturbing.  It's not like I'm going to deploy SharePoint tomorrow just to get around this issue.

I didn't anticipate it would cause this much issue, but I'm pretty sure that this (and things like it) are going to slow down the adoption of Exchange for folks making heavy use of Public Folders today, unless Microsoft provides a management console for it.  Let's see how I feel in another few weeks once I have had a chance to dig deeper into the documentation.  For now, my impression is that some questionable design decisions were made for this new release that might be fine for new Exchange adopters, but will almost certainly penalize existing Exchange users who didn't plan to hire a cadre of consultants to assist in their migration...

Share Post: