upgrade from 3.0(2) to 3.1(5) as well as exchange 5.5 to 2K

[colin-hart]

First thanks for this site. I have found the answer to almost all of my questions right here before I even had to ask.

My questions are simple ones.

#1

I have read all the posts about upgrading but I have yet to read anything about an upgrade from 3.0(2) to 3.1(5). We haven't had too many problems except a memory leak which I am working on now and an occassional unexpected restart every few months.

#2

We are still running Exchange 5.5. I have heard alot of horror stories about Unity under Exchange 2000 from friends and installers but I don't seem to see any online in this forum so I present the question to everyone. Is the upgrade from 5.5 to 2K worthy or should I wait for 2003?

thanks in advance

[oliviers]

I'd highly suggest going to 3.1.5. It has fixed a number of problems since 3.0.2. I'd be curious to know the specifics of these horror stories. There's more security considerations with E2k than E55 since AD is far more complicated than E55 permissions. Even with that, the documentation and utilities such as the Permissions wizard helps to simplify an E2k environment.

Speaking strictly from a technical Unity standpoint, there's not much difference in the messaging layer in Unity b/w E55 and E2K. Mapi is Mapi, regardless of the Exchange version. In Unity's directory layer, there's a huge difference b/w E55 and E2K since the directories are different. But that's not to say that one is better than the other.

Other than the security issues with getting Unity to work E2K, I can't think of any repetitive, persistant problems one would run into with E2K rather than E55. E2K is more complicated, so maybe that's it. If there's some elaboration on those stories, we can help to avoid those problems in the future.

Even if you chose to stay at E55, the move to 3.1.5 is a good idea. Hopefully the problems you mentioned earlier will not occur at 3.1.5, but in the event that they do, it's much better to troubleshoot and support a system that has the latest released code.

If you do chose to move to E2K, get to 3.1.5 first.

[steven.brummer]

#1 Can't help you here at all, I started my Unity experience at 3.13

#2 I hope I can help out here a lot for you. We are running Unity 3.1.4 in a mixed mode Ex5.5/Ex2k world currently. We have Unity attaching to the Exchange 2000 servers. When we were in talks regarding the installation of Unity, we were told that it would be better for us to install Unity into the Ex2k system since it does quite a bit of schema extensions and such. We were even told that we might have more problems if we installed it into a Ex5.5 server and then moved it to a Ex 2000 server.

I haven't had any problems with Unity being installed into a Exchange 2000 server. The one major thing you're going to need to do is get yourself on Active Directory. That's going to be a big part of your "upgrade" to Exchange 2000/2003. I think the easiest way to do that would be a Mixed mode migration, but those don't work for everyone.

In summary, get yourself upgraded to Exchange 2000 and Active Directory and then upgrade to Exchange 2003 when it becomes available and maybe even wait for at least 1service pack to come out first.

[colin-hart]

thanks for all the help. The horror stories I am talking about that I hear, to be honest nobody really gave me specifics just that it was a bad idea. I kind of had a feeling it wouldn't be since we have exchange 2k running in another envoronment and it works great.

I think I will try the 3.1.5 upgrade this week

thanks again