Environment: Exchange 2007 in both forests, BES 4.1.6 in Forest A, BES 5.0 in Forest B.

We're migrating to a new Forest/Exchange/BES and yesterday I moved myself and one other person so that we can do some initial testing. One thing surprised me though, and I'm wondering if this is normal behavior or something to be concerned about.

I moved the mailbox to my migrated user account in the new Forest, and then added my user account to the new BES 5.0. I was then about to go reactivate my blackberry, when I noticed it had already done the reactivation It kept my password, same settings, etc... but sends/receives as the new email address. One thing that I did notice missing was the Reconcile Now option, which I corrected by resending the Service Books. This worked exactly the same for the other user as well, except his didn't lose the Reconcile option.

The only thing I did afterwards was remove the accounts from the old BES server.

So... is this destined to fail, or is this expected behaviour? Thanks!

You've created a new forest or a new domain in the same forest?

Which application / EMS command did you use to perform the mailbox move?

New Forest. I migrated the user accounts over and kept their SID history and am manually moving their mailboxes/adding them to the new BES while we migrate their workstations over.

EMS Command:
move-mailbox -TargetDatabase "exchange.newforest\storage group\mailbox database" -Identity 'mailbox name' -GlobalCatalog dc.newforest -SourceForestGlobalCatalog dc.oldforest -NTAccountOU "OU=XXXXX,DC=newforest" -SourceForestCredential $c -TargetForestCredential $t

Did you remove yourself from the 4.1 SP6 server first? is the 4.1 SP6 server and the 5.0 server sharing the same configuration database?

Did you move the Blackberry user using the transporter tool. I found some changes need to keep the blackberry fully activated cross-forest...

What did you do to migrate cross forest successfully?

No, I didn't remove myself from the 4.1 server before adding to 5.0 - I did remove my account from 4.1 after it reactivated on 5.0. They are not sharing the config db.

Nope. Is it possible that because I hadn't removed the user from the 4.1 server before adding to 5.0, that it used this tool automatically?

Just to summarize:

1) move mailbox to new forest
2) add user to bes
3) notice device happily magically activated on new bes
4) resend service books from new bes
5) delete user from old BES? (or you haven't done that yet)

Exactly, including step 5 as I've deleted both myself and the other user's accounts from the old BES.

So after digging around I found one main issue. The Policies would not apply. After reading View Document it sounds like we need to reactivate these anyway. Unless of course we don't care about having control of our policies. Something tells me that won't go over well ;)

Ahh, whew

You had me thinking that this was actually supported and I had been horribly mis-informed.

Good to know (well not really) that forest moves still aren't supported.