Exchange 2003 Woohoo

After a day of issues, I finally got the first Exchange 2003 server installed in production at work. Woa, was it a crazy thing, first, something I was sure was removed a while ago, still existed, the Active Directory Connector. Of course, it wasn’t, and I wasn’t able to uninstall it because I didn’t have the right permissions. After talking to our directory services team, they wanted a lot of process to get it uninstalled. I called Microsoft and they were able to give me a work around. After that, I ran into an issue with the way that Exchange 2003 installs, it will not install on a new system if there are still front end servers running Exchange 2000. The first tech I talked to explained that there was no way around it that I would have to upgrade the Exchange 2000 front end servers. I wasn’t satisfied with that answer so I called the Microsoft Technical Account Manager for our account and requested an audience with a senior engineer. After a little conversation we determined that the best way to do it would be to create a new administrative group and install the servers in that group. That worked like a charm, of course, we tested it in the VMWare Lab first. Ok, time to get back to work.