Opportunity
Exchange 2007 is available now and will provide the foundation for the next wave
of messaging technology. Although service providers will need to make a significant
investment in hardware, this also highlights why existing inhouse Exchange customers
will be more motivated to outsource their Exchange hosting rather than to make this
investment themselves.
Legacy Exchange
As Microsoft drops support for Exchange 2000, organisations will be seriously looking
at outsourcing rather than going through the pain of upgrading.
Currently Hosting Exchange 2003?
If you're hosting Exchange 2003, Cortex can not only manage your existing 2003 users,
it will also assist you in moving your existing customer base across to your new
Exchange 2007 servers.
Cortex will:
- Allow Exchange 2003 to operate concurrently with Exchange 2007 in the same Active
Directory.
- Make the end-user transition to Exchange 2007 as seamless as possible.
- Automate and control the process needed to upgrade users and customers.
- Let you migrate at your required pace.
What the upgrade process involves
Cortex allows user level Exchange packages to be flagged as a 2003 or 2007 package.
A user upgrade is performed by simply assigning the user to a 2007 package.
When upgrading a user to Exchange 2007 Cortex will move the user’s mailbox to the
appropriate Exchange 2007 server and then upgrade the user setting attributes appropriately.
When all users in the customer have been moved, the Exchange service for the customer
can then be flagged as '2007' – this will initiate the migration of the Offline
Address Book (OAB) to the 2007 server and also upgrade legacy Address Lists and
Global Address List objects. Web distribution for OABs can also be enabled at this
point.
More information is available here on the
Exchange provisioning and delegated administration features
within Cortex.