Interorg BES migration
 

Greetings,

I'm in a bit of a pickle. I've just been informed that our Australian Exchange migration will be happening in a few week's time and I need to ready a plan for migrating our BES users to a new BES server.

We're looking at an Interorg (or is it Intraorg?) Migration from an old Exchange 5.5 organization to a new Exchange 2003 Organization, and new AD 2003 forest/domain. I vaguely recall having to do this several years ago, but can't for the life of me recall how exactly we went about doing it. I do recall that BES relies heavily on the Exchange DN for access to a user's mailbox, and that will change when moving the users over to the new Org.
A call to RIM a couple months ago, and a fair amount of internet searching hasn't really clarified the issue any. I'm hoping someone can validate one of the two scenarios that I see for this migration:

1.) We pay for and use the BES Migration Kit. Unfortunately, I've not found any suitable technical documentation that states that this will in fact be applicable for our migration scenario. Even RIM sales keeps sending me marketing-type fluff.

2.) I export the user information from the Source BES using the BES User Admin utilities, and recreate the objects in the brand new environment (making sure to disable the SRP and services on the Source). Once the users are created, for all to perform an OTA activation. Fortunately, we're only talking 20 or so users, so the load shouldn't be too bad. Even so, I'd prefer to do a less disruptive migration if at all possible.

Any suggestions? For the record, we're talking BES 4.1.4.

Thanks!

This is not possible.

You cannot perform an InterOrg Migration with BES. The boundary for an Exchange BES is the Exchange Organization, and there is no method to migrate between environments.

You will have to reactivate all users.

Ok, so that's what I thought. We'll need to export the user lists and re-import into the new. Once created, I can signall all to be re-activated.

Thanks for confirming my suspiscions.

No, you cannot import and re-import. You need to add each user effectively net new.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but if I use the BES User Admin tool (via the resource kit), I can effectively import "new" users en mass into the Target system, no? Of course, I may have to modify their properties. so BES recognizes their new mailbox (new DN).

Tomorrow, I plan on testing this on a VM.