Hey guys, first, let me give you some background...I am a level 1/2 Support Tech and Junior Network Analyst. I am learning from my boss and usually his methods are good, but this one time there were some things I questioned and had concerns with. With this recent Exchange deployment, he did not listen to my questions or suggestions and now there is a giant mess I have to clean up in order to make our client happy. And it has led me to have many busy, late nights trying to fix these mistakes.Now, on to the problem.This is a half business decision/lack of fighting from my Boss, but a client wanted to get off of Telus hosted E-mail (POP3) and go to Exchange. We said "Yes! Absolutely!". We got Server 2008, Exchange 07 and couldn't be happier. Now here is the problem. They wanted to put it in a smaller office in another city and connect to the darn thing with a VPN that is A) Inconsistent, and B) Uhh.... a VPN...Exchange.... COME ON. But my boss just said "Yes!" and we went with it. (This was my first sign of concern).After we get the server located at a Data Center in the city we start to migrate users. First issue, because we set "use Cached mode" the .ost file was being created and mirrored on the Server and the VPN dropped causing corrupted .ost files, corrupted profiles, SLOW performance and more time wasted on me manually copying files over to the server. Secondly, performance was terrible, migrating users accounts was a disaster, and it goes on.Now my questions....What is the standard way to move users from POP3 to Exchange? I would figure it would be export the users .pst files to the server, use the Mailbox import tool to import the .pst info to the users inboxes over a weekend and then on Monday BAM add the Exchange account and they could be happy. In this scenario we added the Exchange accounts manually and moved over the mail, contacts, calendar, etc. manually and then deleted the old account. Is there even a Snap-in or a MS tool that we could have used to help us with this?Is it possible to have 2 active Exchange 2007 Servers, clustered and redundant at the 2 locations so local users connect to that node but it is redundant from the 2 locations over WAN or VPN, what have you?Is cached mode a bad idea in this Scenario?RPC over HTTP is slow for remote users, is there a better method or is this the best we have? We only have the VPN up because all of the users in the original location, and there are a lot, would have liked it to act as if the Exchange server was on site, thus the use of the VPN.I am sure I will have more questions after some people comment. Thank you very much for your time, and hopefully you can help me better understand Exchange and when I am out doing this again here or for another consulting service, I will be able to really nail the deployment.Thanks!

Hi, So far, we do not have any tool to migrate account from Telus to Exchange. So I afraid that you have to manually export the mailbox and then import it to Exchange mailbox. For question about mail server redundant, one mailbox only can be stored on one mail Server. If you want to perform high availability for Mail Server, then you can deploy CCR which can smoothly failover to passive mode when disaster occurred to active mode. But for your issue, I think you have to change to the high link between mail server with client. It is a good choice to use outlook in Cache mode. In cache mode, it provides you with a better experience when you use a Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail account. A copy of your mailbox is stored on your computer. This copy provides quick access to your data and is frequently updated with the mail server. The main point of your issue may could be the bandwidth. We need enough bandwidth so that client can access mail server to obtain their data. After that, we can cast off slow link via VPN to access mail server. We can use outlook anywhere to access user mailbox. It use the WindowsRPC over HTTP Proxy component to access their Exchange information from the Internet. Cluster Continuous Replication http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124521.aspx Plan a Cached Exchange Mode deployment in Outlook 2007 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179067.aspx#section1 Overview of Outlook Anywhere http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123741.aspx Hope it helps. Xiu

Okay, by High Link you would mean use a dedicated Internet Connection the first time they get their data, then hook up the VPN for access? We would have liked to put the Exchange server on the LAN before moving it to the Datacenter but this would have caused Several Active Directory issues down the road.