Priasoft Exchange Migration Software

Last week I completed my Exchange 5.5 to 2003 migration, and I am so glad that it is over. I used a software package from Priasoft that did the heavy lifting and fixed most if not all of the issues that I would have otherwise had to solve manually. The software moved my mail boxes so quickly that I didn't need to have a co-existence period with two Exchange Organizations, and we only had an 8 hour outage to complete the mailbox migration portion. They promised a public folder utility that never seemed to materialize, so I manually moved my public folders over (very lame). Manually moving the public folders appears to strip out some of the ownership, so only folder owners can edit items. Creating new items follows the permissions that are given in the default, but editing old items can only be done by folder owners so far as I can tell. Going forward that will be fairly minimal pain, but having a tool to fix permissions would have made the migration suite perfect.

The sales process was pretty smooth, and the engineer did a way better job selling the product than the salesman could have ever done. I ended up paying $30 per mailbox, but post sale the engineer mentioned someone being extended a quote for $15 per mailbox so you negotiating skill may be very useful here. The software is licensed per mailbox, which can be very painful if you have several thousand mailboxes, but not nearly as painful as doing it manually. Trust me, this tool is way better than Active Directory Connector and Exmerge. I nuked 30 mailboxes that didn't have didn't have accounts in the new AD Domain by accident. The ADC is a very blunt tool not for the faint of heart, and Exmerge is not fast, not direct and painfully manual.

On the whole I would recommend this tool to anyone stuck on Exchange 5.5 looking to go to a supported Exchange platform. When we get ready to move from 2003 to 2007, or even whatever comes after 2007, I will most likely look to Priasoft again to help make the process nearly pain free.