This Guide will explain the detailed steps required to do cross forest migration from source forest running Exchange 2003 to target forest running Exchange 2010.

Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) will be used to migrate user accounts as well as computer accounts. There are two scenarios when using ADMT to migrate user accounts with Exchange:

1. Run Prepare-MoveRequest.ps1 script first then ADMT: in this scenario the steps will be in the following order:

a. Prepare-MoveREquest.ps1: The script will be used to create Mail Enabled Users (MEU) in the target forest; the MEUs will be disabled and will contain the following attributes: legacyExchangeDN, mail, mailnickname, msExchmailboxGuid, proxyAddresses, X500, targetAddress, userAccountControl, userprincipalName.

b. ADMT to migrate user accounts: the main target is to get the old SID from the source domain (SID History), and to synchronize the password from the source domain to the new user account in the target domain, of course other AD attributes could be migrated like phone, address, title…

c. Move Mailbox: using new-move request from the source forest to the target forest.

d. ADMT to migrate the computer account: this will mainly disjoin the client machine from the source domain and join the new domain, also will add (or replace) the SID of the new user in the target forest on the same profile used by the old user account, other options available like local group, profiles…..

2. Run ADMT first then Prepare-MoveRequest.ps1: in this scenario the steps will be in the following orders:

a. ADMT to migrate the user accounts from the source forest to the target forest, users will be created or merged by ADMT not the script, SID history and password synchronization along with other AD attributes could be merged from the source forest to the target forest. By default ADMT is excluding all Exchange attributes.

b. Convert the user accounts created or merged by ADMT to Mail Enabled User (MEU) accounts with proxy address as the source forest user account.

c. Prepare-moverequest.ps1: the script will be used with –localobject and –overwritelocalobject switches, so the script will use the existing user accounted and will not create new account.

d. New-MoveRequest: to move the mailbox from the source forest to the target forest.

Choosing which scenario will be based on the customer environment, the selection of the scenario should consider:

1. First Scenario: This is the easy and straight forward scenario, should be used if the target forest (domain) is newly created, no users from the source domain exist in the target domain.
2. Second Scenario: As this is more complicated scenario, it should be used if ADMT must run first before prepare-moverequest, and this will be needed in case of there are already users from the source forest in the target forest.

This series of articles will focus on the second scenario. Before going on the detailed steps, let’s first explain the environment and the requirements.

The current environment includes the following:

1. Source forest running Windows 2003, and Exchange 2003 (egypt.tailspin.com), email address of all user accounts @egypt.tailspin.com
2. Target forest running Windows 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 (tailspin.com), email address for all users @tailspin.com.
3. There are already user accounts for the source forest in the target forest, created manually and used by many applications, and they must be used.

The following diagram shows the details of the current environment:

As the migration will take time, the co-existence period should be considered, so this guide will cover the following:

1. Addressing the migration challenges.
2. Configure Mail Flow between the two forests.
3. Migration of user and computer accounts using ADMT.
4. Exchange Mailbox migration using native tools.
5. Enable sharing Free/Busy information between the two forests, so when the user is migrated to the target forest, he will still be able to check the free/busy information of other users in the source forest and vice versa.

The second part of this guide will address the migration challenges and setting up the mail flow between the two forests.

Exchange 2010 Cross-Forest Migration Step by Step Guide – Part I

Exchange 2010 Cross-Forest Migration Step by Step Guide – Part II

Exchange 2010 Cross-Forest Migration Step by Step Guide – Part III

Some people face issues with starting up user profile synchronization service. The main thing is that they find it hanging on “Starting”. They resolve this issue by changing the start type for the service to be “Automatic – Delayed Start”.

Please note that changing the services manually is unsupported. The best action is to troubleshoot the issue using the steps in the technet article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg750257.aspx

Note that the article specifically mentions that “The User Profile Synchronization service can take up to ten minutes to start”. In some cases, it even took more than that depending on the environment and the hardware. So, apply the troubleshooting steps, and be patient with the service starting time. You will find that the service will start successfully without changing the start type and going out of support.

Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2012 Beta 1 has been announced earlier this month by Michael Niehaus.

From the new features that come along MDT 2012 Beta 1, we will explore the new added Task Sequence template called “Deploy to VHD Client Task Sequence” which is used for Windows 7 VHD installation. A second Task Sequence for Server is available as well to boot Windows Server 2008 R2 from a VHD but that scenario won’t be covered in this article.

Let’s start by importing the Windows 7 Operating System into the workbench. After that, right click on Task Sequence and click New Task Sequence.

Enter the Task sequence ID, and the Task sequence name, and click Next.

In the Select Template page, select “Deploy to VHD Client Task Sequence”, and click Next.

Choose the Windows 7 OS, and click Next.

For the remaining pages, select your choice, and click Next till you hit Finish.

As I am working in a Hyper-V environment, I have attached the WinPE bootable file to a newly created machine, and booted the machine.

Now is time to experience the new User Interface

On the Initialization phase, click Next

On the next page, type your credentials to connect to the network share

On the Welcome screen, click “Run the Deployment Wizard to install a new Operating System”

On the Task Sequence page, select the task sequence, and click Next

Keep or modify the computer name, and click Next

Select Whether to join a Domain or a Workgroup, and click Next

For the rest of the pages, select your choice until you’re at the Ready page

Click Begin, and the installation will start

If we look back to the Task Sequence we created, we will see similar tasks and group of the tasks to the “Standard Client Task Sequence” template. What makes the VHD sequence template different is actually the “New Computer” scenario where we notice three additional tasks as shown below

Back to our client machine, the task sequence will create the VHD file

and the Windows installation will proceed

After the installation is successfully done, and by clicking on Disk Management from the Computer Management, we notice that the Operating System is booted from the VHD, and the VHD file is located in the VHD directory on the OSDisk partition

As you’ve seen, it is a simple process and I recommend you try it out!!

To join the MDT 2012 Beta 1: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=217606

Cheers!!

Now I faced this solution many times now and for many problems that I faced so I decided that I would blog about all the issues that I faced and where solvable by this same solution.

The SENS service (or the System Event Notification Service) is designed for “Applications designed for use by mobile users require a unique set of connectivity functions and notifications. In the past these individual applications were required to implement these features internally. The System Event Notification Service (SENS) now provides these capabilities in the operating system, creating a uniform connectivity and notification interface for applications. Using SENS developers can determine connection bandwidth and latency information from within their application and optimize the application's operation based on those conditions.” (*)

So I will start with the solution for all the problems I faced and that was to stop this service by issuing the command :

net stop sens

Now the problems I faced and that are solvable by this solution are:

1. The explorer view of SharePoint lists was not working.
2. When you try to publish an InfoPath form it would keep telling you that the target URL is not valid.
3. Cannot connect to server when you try to access SharePoint data from MS-Office applications.

Now to be clear this would be only needed if you have SharePoint and Office client applications installed on the same machine, and hence it should never happen in production environments and so this solution would only be applicable for development/test environments as the office client applications would be running on other machines that do not have SharePoint installed on them.

In my previous 2 posts on Host Named Site Collections, I laid out the powershell scripts to create Host Name site collections as well as creating managed paths under them.

After that, these site collections can be handled using PowerShell scripts normally.

In case of needing to migrate path-based site collections to host-named site collections, you can simply backup the path-based site collection & restore it to the newly created host named site collection.

A sample script for such backup & restore operation is as follows:

$hostHeaderWebApp = "http://<WebAppName>:<WebAppPort>"

$firstHostNamedSiteCollection = “<URL of Host Name Site Collection>”

$OriginalSiteCollection = "<URL of Path Based Site Collection>"

$BackupPath = "c:\temp\TestSiteBackup.bak"

Backup-SPSite $OriginalSiteCollection -Path $BackupPath

Restore-SPSite -Identity $firstHostNamedSiteCollection -Path $BackupPath -HostHeader $hostHeaderWebApp -Force

SharePoint 2010 SP1 is almost here. It is expected by the end of June:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2011/05/16/announcing-service-pack-1-for-office-2010-and-sharepoint-2010.aspx