Exchange 2010 New Forest Migration Provisioning Distribution Lists

Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 have the ability to provision mailbox enabled users. What about Exchange Distribution Lists? Previous options were to use a third party migration suite or powershell or even LDIFDE. As you noticed ADMT 3.2 by default does provision or create Exchange Distribution Lists. If you use ADMT 3.2 to migrate a Distribution List, it will get migrated to the target forest but as a flat AD group only. Exchange is unware of this group being a Distribution Group. In order for ADMT 3.2 to provision this as an AD group you have to prevent ADMT 3.2 from exluding Exchange attributes during the migration.

Create a new notepad file and name it ADMTexclusion.vbs and enter the lines below.
Set objMig = CreateObject("ADMT.Migration")
objMig.SystemPropertiesToExclude = ""

Then run the file on your ADMT server:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64>cscript c:\admin\scripts\admtexclusion.vbs

Caveats: ADMT excludes Exchange attributes by default to prevent issues with provisioning mailbox users prior to Exchange 2010 SP1. So ensure that you're on SP1. To get additional details read article below. Also note that even though you provision the DL with ADMT it will not bring over all the attributes such as send restrictions, hide from GAL etc.

Exchange 2010 Cross-Forest Mailbox Moves
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/08/10/455779.aspx


James Chong
MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+
Security+, Project+, ITIL
msexchangetips.blogspot.com