Exchange Migration from Hosted 2007 to 2010 on SBS2011

We are a big fan of hosted exchange around here, it’s the not-so-secret sauce that makes everything sync no matter which device or computer you have. Sometimes our clients need or want to have their own server in house, and when that happens we need to do a migration.

In years past, all migrations were done manually, on the client side and it was not an easy task. These days we have more options thankfully. One of our favorites is migrationwiz.com – the options sound so E A S Y and in most cases, it’s an effortless migration. You simply build a “connector” which contains the “how to” for the source server and the destination server. For example, you would enter the Outlook Web Access or OWA credentials for the source server, in this case the source server is Exchange 2007 from Lanlogic and the owa address is mail.myhostedexchange.com. The destination server is an SBS 2011 Standard on-premise installation with a standard url for OWA of remote.domainname.com/owa

We have enabled autodiscover using an SRV record, per Dave Shackelford’s excellent blog post at http://www.thirdtier.net/2011/06/setting-up-autodiscover-for-sbs-2011/ and for the most part, everything went very smoothly.

The issue we are troubleshooting is that in certain contacts both on OWA and client side have the EMAIL ADDRESS field hyperlink REMOVED, and therefore when you try to send mail to that contact, you get a useless pop-up error ”An Outlook Address Book entry cannot be used as an email address in a contact”

The contacts that are particularly affected also appear in the new “suggested contacts” folder  (which is supposed to be the replacement for the .nk2 autocomplete functionality of prior versions of Outlook). By the way, Microsoft has never fully documented the process of .nk2 conversions or lack thereof to the new suggested contacts feature. Especially lacking is the information about how to move this from one profile to another.

This is incredibly frustrating. Is it a client side issue, server side issue, attributable to the differences in Exchange 2003 vs. Exchange 2010, or is it on the migrationwiz.com end of things? Migrationwiz says it’s a client side issue and refers us to http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-outlook/getting-an-error-message-when-sending-mail-an/f0334df7-df48-e011-8dfc-68b599b31bf5?msgId=ecf6e37d-5b7d-4c5c-a4ed-9f37f50d55da&tm=1340255100486.

We vehemently disagree since we can still see the original data on the source OWA server and the email address field is intact.

As you might imagine, the client is not too pleased with this issue and is clamoring for a fix.