Like an STD, Exchange surfaces again

[SIGH] That’s all I could do.  Last week I was given back the task of running Exchange for our company, and completing the project of integration amongst all of our offices and our parent.   To give you some background, we used to be a Notes mail shop.  Then our parent (who runs Exchange primarily) bought us.  As such we now had 4 major offices in North America.  3 legacy Exchange 5.5 shops and one Notes shop.  As such, Notes (for email anyway) would have to go away.  So about a year ago, I ran a project and migrated our office off of Notes and to Exchange 2000 running in a clustered environment. The project was a success, and we now had 3 offices on 5.5 yet, and ours on 2000.

What was supposed to happen was that our European parent company was going to be rolling out a global Exchange 2000 system.  Well it got pushed back so far that they decided to go to Exchange 2003.   So, what needs to happen now is that our parent will create a global Active Directory structure.  And then all 4 offices will become a part of this AD with a branch specifically for North America.  That means that I’m in charge of the project that will require all of us to migrate off of NT domains to AD domains, as well as converting three offices from Exchange 5.5 to 2003 and one office from 2000 to 2003.  Needless to say, this is really going to be a nightmare.  A nightmare that I had given up 6 months ago when email was given to a different department.

Back then I was thrilled as I no longer had to manage Exchange.  I thought I would never have to manage it again, but like a persistent STD, Exchange returned.  We re-orgged again, and now I’m again afflicted.  In my own mind i’m calling this Project Herpes.  Catchy ain’t it?hank god I still have Domino around here for applications or I might have to find a bell-tower.