Upgrading to Exchange Server 2007

Exchange 2007 is designed to coexist with Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2000. However, Exchange 2007 doesn't support all legacy features. Exchange 2000 services that aren't supported by Exchange 2007 include

• cc:Mail Connector

• Exchange 2000 Conferencing Server

• Instant Messaging Service

• Key Management Service

• Microsoft Exchange Chat Service

• Microsoft Mobile Information Server

• MS Mail Connector

Also, Exchange 2007 doesn't support the following Exchange 2003 features:

• Connector for Lotus Notes

• GroupWise connector

• X.400 connector

After you decide which servers to upgrade to Exchange 2007, the next step in the process is to switch your Exchange organization into native mode, which essentially tells Exchange that there are no Exchange 5.5 servers in the organization. I'll assume that you're working with only Exchange 2003; the exact procedure for switching to native mode is different if you're using Exchange 2000.

To switch your Exchange organization into native mode, open Exchange System Manager, then right-click the node that represents your Exchange organization. Click Properties, and the console displays a dialog box that gives you the chance to switch to native mode. Note that this is a one-way conversion: You can't switch back to mixed mode, which is required for Exchange 5.5, after you make the change. As Figure 3 shows, when the process is complete, the dialog box indicates that the Exchange organization is running in native mode.

Suppressing Link State Updates
If your Exchange organization includes legacy servers, you might have to tweak the registry on those servers to suppress link state updates. Exchange 2007 requires that link state information is suppressed, but you'll have to make this modification only if your organization contains more than one Routing Group Connector.

Before I show you what to do, I have to keep the lawyers happy by mentioning that modifying the registry is dangerous. You can destroy Windows and your applications if you make incorrect registry modifications. I therefore recommend making a full system backup before continuing.

With that said, open the registry editor (regedit.exe) on each of your legacy Exchange servers and navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\RESvc\Parameters subkey. Right-click the Parameters container and select New, DWORD. When prompted, create a DWORD value named SuppressStateChanges and set the Value data field to 1. When you're done, restart the SMTP service, the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) Stacks service, and the Exchange Routing Engine service.

If you have a lot of legacy servers, you can perform the registry edit on one server, then export the registry subkey to a file. You could then push the file to the other servers. When each server opens the file, the change will be made to its registry.

Final AD Preparation
As you might recall, when you installed Exchange 2003 for the first time, you could prepare AD by running Setup with the ForestPrep and DomainPrep switches. If you neglected to perform these tasks, Setup would perform them automatically when you attempted to install Exchange 2003. Exchange 2007 offers you a similar AD preparation mechanism that you can run before installation.

Before proceeding, you should perform a full system-state backup of your schema master and of at least one DC in each domain that will contain an Exchange 2007 server. The commands I'm about to show you modify the AD schema, so you'll want a current backup should something go wrong during the AD preparation process.

The first command you must run is

setup /PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions

This command sets some necessary permissions in portions of AD that Setup will modify during the remaining steps. If you skip this step but run the remaining commands, the Recipient Update Service will fail on your Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2000 servers.

The next step in the process is to extend the AD schema by entering the following command:

setup /PrepareSchema 

After the schema has been extended, it's time to prepare AD with the following command:

setup /PrepareAD 

This command creates the Exchange 2007 administrative group, the Exchange Universal Security Group, and the Exchange 2007 routing group.

The last step in the AD preparation process is to prepare the individual domains in which Exchange servers will reside by typing the command

setup /PrepareDomain:<target domain> 

For target domain, use the Fully Qualified Domain Name. If you have a lot of domains that will host Exchange 2007 servers, you can take a shortcut by preparing all of the domains at once with the command

setup /PrepareAllDomains

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