In many of the disaster recovery scenarios in Exchange 2007, one of the most useful cmdlets is the “Move-mailbox” with the “ConfigurationOnly” parameter.

With the “ConfigurationOnly” parameter the mailbox content is not physically moved but instead mailbox configurations gets changed “mailbox location”, for example we could direct the mailbox(s) to a functioning server and create a dialtone database or if we have a database with clean shutdown state (from a failed server or backup) we could mount this database on a different functioning server and redirect users to that database (Database Portability) .

In Exchange Server 2010 the “Move-Mailbox” cmdlet is now replaced with the “New-MoveRequest” cmdlet and the “ConfigurationOnly” parameter is no longer available.

So in Exchange 2010 to maintain this powerful functionality and to allow a configuration only move of mailboxes, we will be using the “Set-Mailbox” cmdlet with the “Database” parameter, for example to move all the users whose mailboxes is on database DB1 to DB5 we will use:

Get-Mailbox -Database DB1 | Set-Mailbox –Database DB5

The example above shows how powerful the Set-Mailbox cmdlet in Exchange 2010 and care should be taken when working with this cmdlet.

I have been asked recently for the required steps to configure Autodiscover when having Multiple SMTP namespaces, I have started writing few lines then upon checking my favorites I found a great bunch of blogs which explains the two possible solutions in great details, so here we go:

http://www.msexchange.org/articles_tutorials/exchange-server-2010/management-administration/exchange-autodiscover.html

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jmayans/archive/2006/09/07/454716.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brad_hughes/archive/2007/12/18/autodiscover-http-redirect-method-using-isa-instead-of-a-second-web-site.aspx

http://www.more2know.nl/2010/05/18/exchange-autodiscover-and-multiple-domains/

background:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332063(EXCHG.80).aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;940881

In Exchange 2010 when a source mailbox is moved from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 using the Mailbox Replication Service there is a potential issue can arise that source mailbox is not removed at the end of the move.

All of the content in the mailbox is moved from the source Exchange 2003 mailbox to the Exchange 2010 destination mailbox. All the user mailbox attributes are updated to point to the new Exchange 2010 mailbox

This issue can be caused by problems within the search folders that are located in the source mailbox

This issue will be mainly encountered in Exchange 2003 servers. This issue currently resolved in the Exchange 2007 mailbox servers that have been upgraded to Service Pack 2.

When you try to purge the mailboxes you will get the following error:

"The Operation cannot be performed because this mailbox was already reconnected to an existing user"

The solution is : http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;930363