Goodbye Exchange 2007

[CraigM]

This morning I finally pulled the plug on our on premises Exchange 2007 server, uninstalling it before killing the Server 2008 VM it was hosted on. Our move to Office 365 was completed 3 weeks ago, so the VM was on borrowed time. As I uninstalled Exchange, it took me on a trip down memory lane. It was originally installed on a decrepit Pentium 4 server, later moving into a Citrix XenServer environment before finally being migrated into Hyper-V. It was originally installed to replace an abomination of a setup that used Pegasus Mail, Mercury SMTP server and some other crazy Novell Netware shenanigans to give the school email. No webmail, no mobile access, no standard usernames etc. In the last 7.5 years of use, the server has generally run very smoothly with very few hassles or issues in all that time. Millions of emails were sent, received and collected into mailboxes, mailboxes came and went as staff and students came and went. Occsaionally there were times when the ISP smarthost we used to deliver mail had issues and we couldn't send and recieve mails for sometimes 2-3 days. Or the times when the ADSL line went down due to external factors and mail couldn't flow.

 

It was the first time I ever ordered a SSL certificate and I remember all the joys around getting our domain in shape to have the certificate issued by Comodo. Brave pioneer staff members started hooking up their BlackBerry's for mobile mail, later moving to iPhones and Androids. I can never forget all the frustrating times trying to get this or that early model Android phones to behave when connecting to Exchange, or telling people that when your password changed at school, you had to update in your phone as well or mail wouldn't work. Fighting with the quirks of OWA in later Internet Explorer versions and trying to explain to staff why their mail wouldn't look right in any other browser. Explaining for the umpteenth time that no, you couldn't get a graphical signature in OWA, it's a limitation in Exchange and there's nothing I can do about it.

 

She's gone now, but will be fondly remembered for the hard work and being there in the "early days"

 

:sniff :sniff

[mjk]

Did that back in 2009 and never looked back. Really nice feeling to decommission services.

[CraigM]

Did that back in 2009 and never looked back. Really nice feeling to decommission services.

 

We only installed Exchange 2007 in December 2009 It was part of a network migration process, or I would have tried to get it installed earlier. Indeed, it is nice to be able to decommision something and use your resources somewhere else. Next up is removing the old school admin package server. That's going terminated with far more prejudice

Edited July 3, 2017 by CraigM

[ibismillah]

What was the migration like when moving to Office 365? I am currently using Exchange 2007

[CraigM]

What was the migration like when moving to Office 365? I am currently using Exchange 2007

 

In our case, initially quite slow since we didn't have high speed internet connectivity. Since we decided to keep all mail for all users, moving the mailboxes across was tedious until we got a higher speed connection in. Once it was in however, things flowed rather smoothly. No mail was lost during the migration and no mail was lost on incoming delivery once I switched MX records. Some staff handled the new interface easily, other struggled and are still struggling a bit.

 

Once I got the copiers configured to send mail out to Exchange Online, it was easy to decomission the old server. Initially I switched it off for a few weeks to see if anything broke or if there was any thing that still needed to be changed. After that period, I killed the server for good.

 

It's been something like 7 months now and I can't say I miss having an Exchange box on site. Mail flows almost as fast as it did locally, SPAM filtering is way better, outgoing messages are properly DKIM signed, mailboxes are bigger than ever, mobile apps for all platforms work well. I haven't evern really begun to scratch the surface of what else a person can do either.