Hello ,

i have a notes 6.5.4 Server and a BES 4.1.6 .
Now my customer wants to upgrade notes to 8.5 and bes to 5.0 .
What would be the best order to do this ? 1st notes , then BES ?
And regarding the BES 5.0:
We are moving to new hardware (on vmware)) , would it better to purchase a 5.0 license and move the users with transporter or should we by an upgrade and then move the whole upgraded server to new hardware ?

I don't know much about notes and how that upgrade would go. We have exchange and personally, I would rather upgrade the mail servers before the BES. That way, as long as you have a good DB, you can always just build a new BES. But again, I don't really know how easy or complex the mail upgrade would be, so I could be wrong.

As for the licensing and migrating, you don't have to buy a new license. I called up RIM and told them I wanted to upgrade my server, they gave me a 3 month Temp SRP for testing, and a 3 month Temp SRP for migrating users. Then they gave me the FTP to them that had all the software (BES5.0 all MR's, and all SP's, and the transporter tool). We build the new server, migrated a few of us to test and play with it, and then migrated all our users. Your CAL's can work on both as long as you are in a migration process. The only thing you need is the temp SRP.

We have recently done a similar migration, we went from Domino 7.0.2 to 8.5.1 and BES 4.1.6 to 5.0.1 MR2. I would upgrade your Domino servers first and then the BES server. We also went with the migration process and found that it worked very well. We migrated about 350 users, and our sucess rate was good. If you have questions you can contact me.

Domino to 8.5.1 first, then BES to 5.0.1. Just did that for my Company...& was very surprised that I saw no errors during the BES upgrade process. (in-place upgrade...4.1.6 MR7 to 5.0.1, 220 users on VMWare). Whole thing took less than an hour to copmplete