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Exchange 2010 Cross Forest Migration: The case of the missing User Account Attributes

Recently I encountered a situation where the client created a new active directory forest was created and all user objects were “migrated” to the new forest. The legacy forest was left intact as Exchange 2003 was not migrated. All applications and other services were migrated to the new forest while Exchange was the only service remaining in the legacy forest. The users accessed their mailboxes via an account in the legacy forest.

I was engaged by the client to design, deploy and migrate to Exchange 2010 SP1 in the new forest. Once this was all setup and configured, migrating the mailbox should be a walk in the park with the power of the Exchange Management Shell. However, in my initial review of the new and old forests, I should have checked the following with the client:

• How were the user accounts migrated? i.e. was a tool used to migrate the accounts? If so, which tool?
• If a tool was indeed employed, which user account attributes were migrated in the migration process?

These questions are very important especially if SIDHistory was not migrated as an attribute on the user account. Read more »

August 1, 2011 Posted by ivorb | Exchange 2010 RTM, Exchange 2010 SP1 | Exchange 2010 Cross Forest Migration, User Attributes | Leave a Comment