[jyindc]

We're in the process of cleaning up an older Exchange 2003 / BES 4.0 installation and moving to 2010 and 5.0.3. I was wondering if you could confirm we're on the right track.

Due to a lot of traveling users and other issues, we've decided not to move everyone at once. So, we currently have two running exchange servers, 2003 and 2010, and two BES servers, 4.0.x and the newest BESX. Our plan was to move a few mailboxes to the 2010 server, then reactivate them on the BESX server, and repeat until finished.

The current BESAdmin mailbox lives on the 2003 server. I have no errors adding mailboxes to the BESX administration screen, but I can't activate mailboxes that live on the 2010 exch server. Any advice on what I might be missing? Do I need a new besadmin mailbox on the 2010 server?

[freakinvibe]

You should not do both migrations at the same time. First, upgrade everybody to BES 5 (using the Transporter tool). Then move to Exchange 2010. See this KB article:

KB22601-How to migrate from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 in a BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 environment

[jyindc]

Thanks for the help. The docs for the Transporter advise against using it on 4.0 era BES. It doesn't say that it won't work, just that it could take much longer to process. Does anyone have any experience with just how much longer we're talking about. I do not wish to upgrade the 4.0 server to 4.1 first.

Would it be easier just to reactivate everyone on the besx server rather than move them?

[freakinvibe]

I have only used transporter to move from 4.1 to 5.0, so I can't comment on how long the 4.0 to 5.0 move would take. I guess it is a matter of testing with a test user.

Would it be easier just to reactivate everyone on the besx server rather than move them?

That depends on what kind of user you have. We have lots of travelling users and many don't want to be bothered with re-activation, so a transparent upgrade without user intervention was much easier for us. But if you have all the users inhouse and don't bother helping them with re-activation, you would not need the transporter.