Hi to all;My organization's Exchange admin is quitting today. Support for the Exchange server has been tossed to the Help Desk. How do I change the password for the Exchange 2003 service account without bringing Exchange to it's knees? Thanks in advance for any and all help.

Which serviceaccount are you referring to? Exchange 200x does not use service accounts for its core services. It all runs in the context op local system and network service. If the administrator changed the service accounts, he did something very stupid. This is not a supported way of running exchange and if you ever run into issues, you will most likely not get support from MS. The Exchange server computer accounts by itself have very specific permissions throughout AD and assigning these to another accounts is not easy and I would be supprised if he pulled this off without giving to much permissions. Cheers, MArk

Hi Mark;When speaking with the outgoing Exchange admin he inferred that if the domain administrator password that we currently use was changed it might affect the workings of Exchange. I didn't install the Exchange server so I assumed that at some point Exchange must have to logon to some system service that is tied to the domain admin password with which Exchange was installed. So, if I am following you correctly, changing the domain admin password will not affect Exchange 2003 in any fashion?...is that correct? Thanks for your input....

Not Exchange itself it wont. Depends on if you have any third party apps integrating with exchange and running under those credentials.