If you happen to be the proud owner of an Exchange 5.5 mail system…come a little closer…
Closer….
Closer…
IT’S TIME TO MIGRATE OFF!!!!
You heard me. According to this there are 400,000 of you guys in the small to medium space and you need to MOVE off that old platform. It served it’s purpose but it’s now time to send it to the server heaven in the sky.
I understand how hard it is to migrate. Trust me. My Thanksgiving dinner this year was a frozen food meal because that’s when I chose to migrate the servers at my office. But “I” was migrating from 2000 to 2003. If you are on 5.5.. you are sooooo overdue for upgrading it’s not funny. Exchange 5.5 was built in the 90’s and just has served it’s purpose. Furthermore, I would argue… if you don’t upgrade to Exchange 2003 you are soooooo missing out on the cool stuff in mail it’s not funny.
Someone on a listserve said that Exchange was overkill for a 4 user firm. No way. I have two users at home…well three if you count the Dog…and we use Exchange. Granted it’s pop accounts and what not…but I just helped someone set up a SBS at home with dynamic IP and they are running full SMTP with a dynamic DNS account. Javier has a post about migrating from POP to SMTP but the info is the same for setting up SMTP from the get-go.
Let me give you another piece of sage advice… not only can we move in an SBS 2003 server that has the same domain name as the old system [and thus not messin’ with the desktops] using a method that many consultants use, we now have guidance to move a SBS 2003 into an existing domain, and … as a result of Jeff’s SBSmigration.com, he now has a building database of consultants that are SBS “Swing” Migration specialists that can help.
Now once you have SBS 2003 and thusly Exchange 2003, you then get all the cool stuff like the Phone that syncs with the server automagically. Cant’ do that with Exchange 5.5, can you? Not to mention it has also all that cool stuff like Tarpit. Dell servers right now are indeed selling with the slipstreamed SP1 so that is pre-enabled.
It’s time.
They’ve served their purpose.
Now please, tell exchange 5.5 admins something they don’t know.
A number of large organizations are still on 5.5, not because of money, or politics, but becuase of sheer size and complexity.
Imagine a global exchange network, running E5.5 and AD. Now migrate it to 2k3, don’t skip a beat, and don’t lose a single piece of mail.
Remember the article was about small and medium firms. We move Exchange databases in SBSland all the time.