Dear Experts,

We currently are running an Exchange 2010 server. This was migrated from SBS 2008, which in turn was migrated from SBS 2003. All works just fine and we experience no problems.

We installed a monitoring system in our network and it complains of a Exchange "MAPI Connectivity" problem when trying to check the health of our public folder database:

"[Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Storage.ObjectNotFoundException]: The Active Directory user cannot be found"

I found a knowledge base article (on our monitoring system's website), which mentions that this could be caused by old fragments left over from an Exchange 2003 migration. It mentions that we should use ADSI Edit and navigate to:

CN=Configuration,DC=yourdomain,DC=local
        CN=Services
              CN=Microsoft Exchange
                   CN=YourOrganizationName
                         CN=Administrative Groups
                                CN=Your Old Exchange 2003 AdministrativeGroupName
                                        CN=Servers

and confirm that the container is empty (which it is). Then we should delete the "CN=Servers" container. We should delete no other Exchange 2003 administrative groups.

Before we go ahead and do this - I just wanted to check with the experts to make sure this is OK. I know that our migration guide mentioned to delete any objects within the "CN=Servers" container (i.e. the old SBS hostname, if it still existed), but not the whole container itself.

Many thanks for your help.

Regards, Oliver

If the container is empty, the new organization isn't using it for anything.  You can safely delete it.  I'll add that if the admin group is fully empty, it isn't being used by the current organization, either.  However, I think I'd do a lot of research before I just went and deleted it - and if there are no alerts flagged by your monitoring system, I'd probably leave it as it is.  Just in case.  (-:

Thanks for your feedback.

I have done lots of research... some say you can and other say you shouldn't. Hence, I thought I would ask myself ;O).

A question, if we deleted the CN=Server container... and it then lead to problems, could we simply create a new container CN=Server again and all would be OK? I would also do a SystemState backup before I deleted... is it possible to then restore this one container from a SystemState backup?

Thanks for your help.

To be safe, you would export the Server container's properties, so that when you created a new one, you could reapply those properties to it.  As for the backup, the system state is for the current computer, not the directory - you are modifying the directory.  You would need to get a full backup of the directory, then restore that if you wanted to restore this container.  It's simpler to recover it from the AD dumpster (assuming you can recover items in the configuration container from the dumpster - I've never tried, and don't know if it's possible).

Not sure how to export the CN=Servers container's properties - right-click gives no option.

Never used AD dumpster before.

Unfortunately, I am still as confused as I was when I did my research, as to whether I should delete this container or not :O(... we can't remove this alert from our monitoring system so it will always show as an alert which is a little silly.

Any other ideas?