We are in the process of moving all of our student email accounts over to Microsoft's live.edu service. As of about a week ago, we experienced a total SAN crash, losing all the student mailboxes that existed on our old legacy Exchange 2003 box. Of course this happened RIGHTBEFORE we were planning to gracefully move everyone over!! So we are in a bit of pickle. We have since created the new email accounts over at the externallive.edu site, with no issues. All of our faculty and staff email is on an internal Exchange 2007 box in the same domain. The problem is, our current Global Address list still has the student AD accounts pointing to to their old "dead" mailbox (@contoso.com). Can I somehow convert these AD accounts to mail users with an external address (@students.contoso.com)? Do I need to remove exchange attributes, and bulk convert to mail users at that point? Will I have to recreate all my distribution groups? Are there some powershell commands to make all this batch creation easier? If I have to use a CSV file to pipeline into a powershell command, what is the proper format? Can I just change their primary SMTP address in bulk? We consider the old mailboxes gone for all intensive purposes...Thanks everyone!P.S. Where is the backup of the old mailboxes you ask? Yeah, that failed on us too. Perfect storm of bad situations unfortunately....it is what it is, and we have to deal with it :I

Hi, I would like to explain that you need to remove the Exchange attribute for the users and then mail enable them by using the external email address. For your reference: You can remove users Exchange attribute by referring following command: Get-user | where {$_.department -eq "student"} | where {$_.recipienttype -eq "usermailbox"} | disable-mailbox Then, you can mail enable the users by using following script: $testuser= get-user | where {$_.department -eq "student"} | where {$_.recipienttype -eq "user"} $n=0 while ($n -lt $testuser.length) { $id=$testuser[$n].identity $nm=$testuser[$n].name enable-mailuser -id $id -externalemailaddress $nm@students.contoso.com $n+=1 } Note: Please test the script on you lab firstly. Mike Shen TechNet Subscriber Support in forum If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com

Thank you. I will give that a try and report back.

fancy! Mike Crowley A+, Network+, Security+, MCT, MCSE, MCTS, MCITP: Enterprise Administrator / Messaging Administrator

Ok, got it all finished! There were only a couple of things I had to modify. On both Get-user commands you need to add -resultsize unlimited. Otherwise, you only get 1000 results. Of course if you have less than 1000 users to make the change to, you can omit it. So to remove the exchange attributes on the accounts... Get-user -resultsize unlimited | where {$_.department -eq "student"} | where {$_.recipienttype -eq "usermailbox"} | disable-mailbox And then the other change was inthe scriptto use SamAccountName as the attribute to pass to the command. This will make sure that it uses the unique account name insteadof just name, which would return their first name and last name causing potential duplicates. So the script would look like... $testuser= get-user -resultsize unlimited | where {$_.department -eq "student"} | where {$_.recipienttype -eq "user"} $n=0 while ($n -lt $testuser.length) { $id=$testuser[$n].identity $nm=$testuser[$n].SamAccountName enable-mailuser -id $id -externalemailaddress $nm@students.contoso.com $n+=1 }I just changed the department on 3 students to Testers and edited the script accordingly to test before I ran it on everyone. Worked like a charm. Thanks!