Importing Custom Recipients
The upgrade to BackOffice 2000 included going from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2000. If I had simply upgraded, it probably would not have been a big deal. But since I was determined to create a brand new installation so I could leave a few pesky problems behind, I had to deal with some transition “challenges”. The easy part was saving every one’s mailbox and then transferring them to the new Exchange Server. I used Personal Folders to do that. However I maintain a number of e-mail lists for organizations I belong to including the SIGs I chair for APCO. Therefore I have LOTS of “Custom Recipients” in Exchange that I needed to transfer as well. I had thought that would be easy. Exchange 5.5 lets you export your custom recipients to a comma delimited ASCII file (.csv). Then you can use the import feature to reinstate these in the new Exchange Server, if it’s still 5.5. Well, mine wasn’t and the import wouldn’t work! Actually there is an import feature for Exchange 2000 but best I could figure out it expected a file created by the Windows 2000 Active Directory. I tried installing Exchange 5.5 on another server and letting it become part of the Exchange 2000’s organization. That didn’t work either. You can add Exchange 2000 to an existing Exchange 5.5 organization but not the other way around. I was pretty much out of luck. . . until I discovered ADC, Active Directory Connector. This is service that comes with Windows 2000 that allows the replication of information between Exchange 5.5 and the Active Directory. I installed Exchange 5.5 on the second server, but created its own Exchange organization and imported the Custom Recipients from the old system. Then I installed the ADC and set it to replicate from Exchange 5.5 to Active Directory. No need here to replicate back the other way, but I could have if needed. I hit the Replicate Now button and all my Custom Recipients and Distribution Lists showed up in the Active Directory! Hurray! 

Nice thing about Custom Recipients in Exchange 2000 (actually they’re called Contacts now)… you can MOVE them! In Exchange 5.5 a Custom Recipient remains in the Recipient Container you created it in. I have created several containers over the years, some of which were no longer applicable but still had some names in them. Now with all my Exchange Contacts in Active Directory, I can move them between organization units (OUs) easily. This makes organizing much simpler.

The Problem with SIS
I ran into another interesting problem in my transition. I had my Office 2000 installation files stored on a drive in the old system. When I looked at the folders they appeared OK and I could list their contents and so on. However, when I tried to run the Setup program for Office, I got a message that the system was unable to access the file! Bummer. Back to the good old TechNet and there I found an obscure reference to SIS.sys as a possible cause of my current set of woes. 

Under the old system I had set up Remote Installation Service (RIS), about which I previously wrote a couple of articles. Nice thing about RIS is that it adds a disk efficiency service to the disk partition it’s installed on called Single Instance Storage, or SIS. If you have multiple copies of files such as created when you save multiple images of operating system configurations, SIS will keep only one copy of the file and simply put a pointer to that file in all the other places the file is supposed to be. A service called “groveler” periodically rummages through the system doing this to keep disk usage at a minimum. This is where I had stored my Office 2000 files. When I installed my new operating system, I hadn’t installed RIS, yet. Therefore the files were not in a condition that was readable by the system. I went through the somewhat lengthy process of installing RIS on the new system, installing it on the same disk partition as the previous installation, and I was then able to access my Office 2000 files. Interesting thing about this is that my SQL data files are also on this partition and I had NO problem accessing them. I guess there weren’t any duplicates for the SIS to work with so the file structure pretty much stayed the same.

Forwarding e-mail
One of my Exchange Server clients had a couple of e-mail users that wanted to receive their e-mail at their personal e-mail account instead of the company’s. Therefore we needed to forward all their e-mail on. Having browsed through the Exchange Administrator and not found a way to do this, we decided to create a rule in Outlook to forward all mail addressed to them to their home accounts. We had to create a Custom Recipient for each user’s home e-mail address to include in the rule. The Rules Wizard is located under the Outlook Tools menu. This seemed to work but I felt there had to be a better way. I posted my query on a Microsoft Exchange newsgroup and some nice soul gave me the answer. It is a simple setting in each user’s mailbox properties. In Exchange 2000, go to the Active Directory Users and Computers and the Users OU. There select the user in question and double click. This will bring up his properties. There will be several Exchange tabs. Select the Exchange General tab and click on the Delivery Options button. In Exchange 5.5, bring up the Exchange user in the Exchange Administrator and click on the Delivery Options tab (I believe, I no longer have Exchange 5.5 installed to check). Here in both systems you will find an opportunity to forward mail destined for the mailbox to another location. This location must be defined as a Custom Recipient in 5.5 or a Contact in Exchange 2000. You can elect to have it forward and keep it in the mailbox or simply pass it on, which is the default. Although you can only select one address to forward it to, it appears that you could assign a Distribution List if you wanted to forward it to multiple recipients.

As I said, my ordeal has and will provide me with much fodder for my column. More to follow!