Thursday 7 April 2011

Converting a mailbox to a linked mailbox, improvements in Exchange 2010 SP1

In Exchange 2007 and 2010 you have to perform two actions to accomplish this. First Disable-Mailbox and then Connect-Mailbox, specifying the linked account to convert the mailbox upon re-attachement into a linked mailbox.

The problem with this method is that it removes all Exchange attributes, basically resetting them. The mailbox is in a disconnected state and until you re-attach the mailbox and re-apply Exchange attributes (email addresses just one example) you can potentially bounce mail.

Exchange 2010 SP1 has a new feature that isn't spoken of (infact TechNet documentation here still points to the above method!) This new command will automatically convert the mailbox to a linked mailbox without any disconnection or loss of Exchange attributes, and will automatically disable the account when applying the linked user.

Set-User -Identity Oliver@contoso.com -linkeddomaincontroller UserAccoundForestDC -LinkedCredential $(Get-Credential accountforestdomainadmin) -linkedmasteraccount Oliver@fabrikam.com

Try it, it works great!





























Enjoy,
Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server

5 comments:

Steve said...

That is exactly what I was looking for. Great find!!! Thanks for the info.

RikardStrand said...

Hello,

Is this a supported way of converting a mailbox to a linked mailbox ?

Do you know if this command (convert) will be made available/supported in Exchange 2007?

Regards,
Rikard

Oliver Moazzezi said...

Hi,

I don't believe this cmdlet will ever be back-ported to Exchange 2007 i'm afraid.

Sailesh K Singh said...

Is there a way to do this for multiple mailboxes (i.e. bulk link mailboxes)? We plan on migrating mailboxes first and user accounts later and need to link moved mailboxes in the target forest back to the users accounts in the source forest.

Oliver Moazzezi said...

Hi Sailesh,

You can have your users listed in a CSV and then make bulk changes with a For-Each statement.