OK, gang… been getting lots of questions on this here and via email… I’ve included a brief statement from the “folks upstairs” on this issue below. I know… not what everyone was waiting to hear.<br><br>The short story is the support issues for having an Exchange 5.5 based system running in an Exchange 2000 environment proved too complex and error prone to be able to support it cleanly. Further, if a site is already running a native Exchange 2000 environment, we can’t “add” Exchange 5.5 to that setup… Since Ex2K no longer has the concept of Organizations/Sites/Servers, the schema is inconsistent with 5.5 and the two can’t share information at all. The only way to pull this off is to actually install the Ex2K servers INTO the Exchange 5.5 site such that their schemas matched. Existing sites with Ex2K were not thrilled to hear this and that’s understandable.<br><br>Even with the Exchange based limitations accepted, we’ve been testing a bunch of scenarios in our labs and at a few field test sites and the short story is, shoe-horning in an Exchange 5.5 system into an Exchange 2000 environment is very difficult, error prone and messy. The chances for potentially ugly results (i.e. directory corruption across the boards) is just too high for us to be able to recommend and/or support it in the field.<br><br>Short story: Until Unity 2.5 is released with NATIVE support for Exchange 2000, we wont support Unity installed and interacting with Exchange 2000 servers in any way. I don’t have a release date for 2.5 yet. Of course I’ll post it here when it’s known.<br><br>Support will be making no exceptions for this rule, so please don't ask them to do so.<br><br>I know this is going to upset some folks… we wanted this to be workable as much as any of you, but it’s simply not a supportable configuration. <br><br>===============================================<br><br>Marketing Flash - 21 Nov 00 - Exchange 2000 update<br><br>On November 1, we distributed an Exchange 2000 Roadmap that indicated Unity Enterprise with Exchange 5.5 on the Unity server could be installed into an Exchange 2000 environment “shortly after Unity Enterprise 2.45 is shipped.” This involved a MAL patch that required testing by QA. <br><br>Unfortunately, our testing has revealed this to be very, very complex. Although we investigated limiting E2K support to a few, tightly defined scenarios, due to the technical complexity and extremely high level of support required to make Unity Enterprise 2.45 work in an Exchange 2000 environment, we will not be able to support Unity Enterprise in an Exchange 2000 environment until Unity Enterprise 2.5 releases this summer. <br><br>Unity Enterprise 2.5 will hit the ground running with full native support for Exchange 2000, including support for Exchange 2000 on the Unity server.<br><br><br>Jeff Lindborg<br>Unity Product Architect<br>Active Voice<br>jlindborg@activevoice.com<br><A HREF="http://members.home.net/jlindborg" target="_new">http://members.home.net/jlindborg</A>
