Unity Restore/Procedure Issue

[r-thatcher]

I am trying to track down an issue with the Unity Retore utility or the procedure in which it was done.

Procedure:

Customer has voicemail only server (4.0(5))installed running it it's own forest/domain with Exchange 2000. We were looking to migrate to another forest/domain running 2000/2003 AD mixed mode with Exchange 2000/2003. To prepare for the move, we ran the Migrate Subscriber Data to map the existing Subscribers to a different Exchange Alias. Instead of first intial last name, we change the alias to their extension. This was done to avoid possible conflicts with existing domain accounts in the forest we were moving too.

Another Unity server was built in that forest/domain and Exchange 2000 was installed on the Unity server. We backed up the existing Unity server including messages using DIRT and put the backup on the new Unity server.

We logged into the new Unity server as the message store account and ran the restore utility.

Issue:

During the sync process we started to notice a lot of failures in the popup window. After the restore was complete we found out that existing account information in the forest/domain had been changed on accounts that we did not want changed. The restore had removed all Display Names and changed the alias on existing accounts to the alias re-mapped using Migrate Subscriber Data.

I guess my question would be since it is being installed in a new forest/domain shouldn't have the restore created a new account for all the subscribers since the alias would not have matched up?

Thanks,

-Ryan

[lindborg]

The DiRT help file talks at length about this process - the "Restore Procedure Overview" section has a list of attributes that the directory syncher looks for users based on in Exchange 2000/2003. They are (in order of search):

ObjectGUID (Unity's directoryID)

Name (Relative Distinguished Name)

mailNickName (Unity's alias column)

sAMAccountName (again, Unity's alias column).

If users are found by one of those criteria, they're bound to. Only if searches on all 4 properties fail in the directory will Unity create new accounts on the fly.

[r-thatcher]

Thanks Jeff. I went through the help file and your training video. I think the problem is with the RDN. I was thinking of the DN format and that's where I got into trouble :).

Do you know of any issues, regarding Unity, with changing the RDN in AD using ADSIEDIT. I ran a test and it seemed to work OK in the lab.

Thanks,

-Ryan

[lindborg]

Once imported into Unity's SQL DB we reference objects in AD by their DirectoryID (object GUID) so I don't think that will have any effect on existing subscribers if that's what you're worried about. However I have not tried this myself so I'd test one of your users out. Be sure to update some properties on that user in AD (i.e. first name) and make sure it replicates to SQL (i.e. shows up in the SA) and conversely that you can make changes in the SA and have them propogate through to the AD. And of course leave/retrieve messages. But as far as I know, this shouldn't cause a problem.