Removing Exchange

The last thing that I want to discuss seems to come up quite often within the public newsgroups, mailing lists and web forums. Assuming that you’ve replicated all your public folders, moved all user mailboxes across and followed the steps within this article, you’re now ready to remove the Exchange server software from the old server.

However, after setting the ‘Action’ field to ‘Remove’ against the Microsoft Exchange component within the Exchange Installation Wizard, you are presented with the error shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Existing Mailboxes Error

How can this be when you’ve already moved the user mailboxes across? Well, it’s likely that you still have some objects within Active Directory that have Exchange attributes configured for this server. To find these objects, perform the following steps:

1. Run Active Directory Users and Computers.
2. Right-click your domain towards the top of the left-hand pane and choose Find from the context menu.
3. In the Find Users, Contacts, and Groups window, click the Advanced tab.
4. Click the Field button and then choose User. From the list of attributes displayed, choose Exchange Home Server.
5. Set the Condition field to Ends With and then type the name of the old Exchange server into the Value field.
6. Click Add to add this condition to the Condition List. An example of what this should look like is shown in Figure 5.
7. Click the Find Now button and you should be presented with a list of objects that still have Exchange attributes. You will need to clear these before you can remove the server. Note that you don’t need to worry about system mailboxes.

Figure 5: Finding Exchange Attributes

Highlight all the results and then go to Exchange tasks.  Then I went to remove exchange attributes and it worked fine for me.