SMTP SSL in Exchange 2007/2010

In exchange 2007 and higher, the default connector are configured to accept passwords only when using a secured connection (Like SSL or TLS).
A good idea
, but...

The SSL option is only available for POP and IMAP, on SMTP you miss this option, here you can only configure a TLS secured connection.

Not a problem.... do you think?
When you still have users accessing your mail server via POP3/SMTP with MS Outlook 2003 (Not uncommon these days) then they don't have the option to use SMTP with TLS, only SMTP with SSL is available...

Other products from the same company not offering SMTP with TLS are: Outlook Express, Windows Mail....

So you will either have to upgrade all clients to a new MS Office version, or downgrade security on your exchange server and allow the SMTP connector to also accept password over unsafe connections.

Or, probably the best thing to do: Just switch to a real mail user agent like thunderbird.....

Migration of MS SBS 2003 to MS SBS 2011

Microsoft has a good document about the steps to migrate a SBS 2003 server to SBS 2011.
It is normally easy and well documented. But as always, there are things not working es expected or documented.

Here a few things:

Migration fails when joining the domain (dcpromo)

• When installing the new server it should automatically join the old domain
• If that join fails, then the migration wizard shows a fatal error and tells you to restart with the whole installtion. (Of course at this point you already had waited about 1-2 hours)
• When you google (or bing) arround, you will see that a "recovery" of the setup process is still possible. Look here for more details.
• One problem might be, that your migration account (usually the Administrator) is using a weak password, one not meeting 2008R2 complex password rules
• Another might be, that your migration user is not member of all required groups

DHCP reservations are not migrated

• Yep, can occure, sometimes it works, sometimes not
• In that case export the leases from the old server and then either add them manually on the new server. See here how to do it almost automatically

After mailbox migration to the new server, the mailboxes are not available and/or the owa shows just a empty screen after login

• Make sure the all required exchange services are running (For example the "MS Exchange RPC Client" is one to not correctly autostart after a server reboot

Other potential MS exchange migration issues

• Access to smtp, pop and imap is no longer allowed with plain text passwords. So you should confiure your clients to use either POP/IMAP with (start)tls or/and with SSL
• IMAP and POP3 connectors are not started by default, you have to enable these services in the service manager
• For external SMTP access to your server (for non-outlook users) it is best to create a SMTP connector on Port 587 (Submission port), that way you can prevent problems when your ISP blocks connections to the standard smtp port
  

Fax migration

• You still have to configure the fax service on the new server before doing the fax migration