Extending AD schema for Exchange2007

[gstalter]

All:

I'm an SE at Cisco and just got a question from a customer. They are running Unity 4.2 and Exchange 2003 just fine.

But...they are wanting to install some Exchange 2007 servers and need to extend the AD schema in order to do that install. They won't be changing anything to the existing Unity/Exchange setup, but are wondering if this schema change might affect it?

Anyone have experience with this?

Thanks.

Greg Stalter

Systems Engineer

Cisco

[espereir]

I understand that you need some information on whether or not the Unity supports Exchange 2007; basically, Unity 5.0 will offer, "first look" interoperability with Exchange 2007 when it releases. This means customers that want to experiment with Ex2007 as the message store/email system will be able to do so in a lab environment - but without TAC support. I'm unaware of any technical documentation that exists today for interoperability between Unity and Exchange 2007 since we have to make changes to our code base to support this, but technical documentation will most likely be made available as was we get closer to the release of Unity 5.0.

Unity 4.2 is not compatible with Exchange 2007, actually the goal is to support it on Unity 5.X; but we will need to find out if the schema needs to be extended (as an AVVID tech, every new train has different modifications on the schema, so I think that Unity 5 installation requires a schema upgrade).

Please let me know if this answers your question.

[Christopher McAlpin]

f.y.i.

The Unity 5.0 release date was extended to include full support for Exchange 2007. So it will be TAC supported, and not just a firt look feature.

As for the Exchange 2007 Schema extensions, it is safe to extend the schema with the Exchange 2007 schema extensions with out having any impatct on Unity 4.x systems.

Chris

[espereir]

Hey Greg,

Actually, Ex2003 and Unity 4.2 should work juist fine, but we haven't test this. the problem will be if Ex2007 changes something that was used on Ex2003, so we need to make sure that Ex2007 is going to keep the add new objects to the schema and not change old objects. A couple of days ago I saw a system running Ex2007 and Ex2003 on the same domain with Unity 4.2.1 without any problems.

For security purposes, I would like to advise you to perform a Dirt backup before deploying the new Exchange cluster.

[espereir]

Hello Greg,

Thanks for the update, I checked this with some of my peers and just to let you know, if somethings happens with the Unity server, you just need to run the Unity schema update again.

[neilrussell]

We have Unity 4.2 pointing to an Exchange 2003 server. I have also added an Exchange 2007 into our domain for testing and therefore had to extend the schema. We have had everything running for a little over a week without any issues.

Good luck.

[espereir]

Hello Neil,

Just a little FYI:

Please remember that having Unity 4.2 with Exchange 2007 as the partner Exchange is not TAC supported, we can do that on a LAB setup, the the risk of loosing TAC support is too high.

Unity 5.X fully supports Exchange 2007.