Migrating a small Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 to 2008

Question

What is the best way to migrate a very small MS SBS setup from 2003 to 2008?

There are two systems, I'll call them old and new. old is running SBS2003 and new is running SBS2008. old has 5 acccounts, and they only use Exchange, so really the only thing that would need to be transferred are the Exchange mailboxes.

What is the easiest way to handle this?

I have found a document from Microsoft that explains the entire process in excruciating detail, but realistically it shouldn't be that hard since I only care about the actual mailboxes. I don't mind recreating the 5 accounts manually and the exporting and importing each mailbox, if that is an easy enough task, and I can be sure that nothing will be lost (including calendar items, tasks, etc...)

Answer 1

Normally I would recommend the document you referred to, or the SBS Migration Kit, but if you're really only worried about the contents of the mailboxes then simply export them from the mailboxes on the old server and import them into the mailboxes on the new server.

Answer 2

If you're only concerned about the mailboxes you could use Microsoft's ExMerge tool to export them to .PST files on the old server, and again to import them on the new. But IIRC, you will lose single-instance storage for those imported messages; if a 20MB PowerPoint were emailed to all five users, for example, it would take up 100MB in the Exchange database rather than the usual 20MB.

Answer 3

SBS2008 will not support Exmerge PST