"Best Practices" or "How do you do it?" type question.
We have a user retiring. She had an AD account and an Exchange 03' (believe that's the correct version) mailbox.
We have a new user replacing her. She has an account and mailbox.
She wants email from the old user forwarded to new user while transitioning vendors' information to have new user as the contact person.
I was told to back up the old user's email to a pst, remove email from old user, then set new SMTP address for new user to additionally have old user's address. "Remove email from old user" is kind of vague…delete mailbox? Remove some setting? Keep old user login intact?
I didn't like that way exactly because we'd probably forget about it and new user would always have these phantom addresses in her settings. Maybe it's the Asperger's in me but I don't like doing it that way.
I exported old user's mailbox to a pst, then poked around for a solution that would make sure the old mailbox was intact (in case we needed it for who knows why, I'm paranoid, and yes we do have a backup that is supposed to be backing up mailboxes too).
I was going to just remove Exchange attributes from the old user account leaving the old account intact for logging in if need be, but the mailbox should be available on the server for recovery if the need arose in the near future.
I verified this by calling someone who has more experience in Exchange; he instead had me disable the old user account object, then set it to forward all email to the new user object. Seemed cleaner and when that old user account is no longer needed we can delete it and I'd assume that'll also wipe the email addresses from the system, ending forwarding.
Is there a cleaner or "better" way to do this that we can document? Or is this a good solution to have used?
Best Answer
The solution your third-party friend provided is very reasonable and is how I would proceed myself.
What I would not do is manually add additional SMTP addresses to individual user accounts, ever. If you did somehow need to maintain the old user's email address for forwarding to a new user after you delete the old user's AD account, I'd recommend creating a mail-enabled group with an Exchange Alias that matches the old user's Alias such that the group gets the same email address as the "old user". Put the user(s) who should receive those emails into that group.
(In general, you should use groups to assign additional SMTP addresses to users rather than doing it by hand. If you have turnover and need to give someone's replacement the same set of custom SMTP addresses as the "old uesr" you need only put the "new user" into the correct groups.)