My Environment: One Exchange 2003 Standard Server My company encountered a hardware failure issue a month age. It caused mail service stopped for 5 hours. I need to design a contingency plan for the mail service. The requirement is provide users to send internal and external mail during the production Exchange server down. I havent enough budgets to set up Exchange clustering. I have an idea to set up an Exchange (e.g. Mail2) as a standby server. In case of production server down, point all users to the standby server. Although users cannot read previous mail in production Exchange server, it allows them to send and receive new mail. If possible, move the mails back to production server when production server is up. With my idea, I set up the Mail2 server in my domain but do not know how to point users to the Mail2 server. Im new on Exchange. Is my idea workable? Does anyone have a suggestion and show me how to do? Many thanks. VL12

Hi, The DR method you are talking about is called a Dial Tone Recovery.Here is a couple ofthe articles on the topic and a search will find you alot more: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998947.aspx http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-Dial-tone-Restore-Method-Part1.html http://www.outlookexchange.com/Articles/AndersonPatricio/AndersonPatricio_c1p1.asp The users can be redirected with a few different ways depending on the exact DR scenario and whether the original server off the air permanently. Since the topic of DR has so many facets I would suggest setting up a virtual DR lab to test the processes. You couldtest the following: DNS redirection for the clients to point to the new Rehome the Exchange usersusing a script - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125087.aspx Manual change of the Outlook profile. There is a lot more information on DR and the various scenarios to plan for but hopefully that gives you astart. Cheers, Rhys