Building a Header File for Exchange 5.5

When upgrading Exchange 5.5 servers to Exchange 2003 in a federated model, I have found that I often cannot rely entirely on the ADC Tools to find potential problems. This is especially true given that I might be working with the central operations folks, but not actually have insight to the directory membership of other administrations in the federation. To work around this, I have generally required a directory dump of all user directory information. I can take this, populate an Access database, and use it to find potential trouble spots (particularly if ADC-Global-Names has been populated prior to the centralized rollout of the ADC). 

Exchange Server 5.5 can export directory information directly to a Comma Separated Value file. The first row of the header file must identify the desired columns for the export. I generally look at the following columns in my exports.

Object-Class, Obj-Container,Home-Server, Directory Name,Display Name,First Name,Last name,Company,Department,Office,Title,Address,City,State,Postal code,Phone number,Telephone-Number,Assistant,Manager,Home phone number,Primary Windows NT Account,ADC-Global-Names

The ADC-Global-Names attribute exists on mailboxes that have been replicated to the Active Directory environment using the Active Directory Connector. If a failed installation of Exchange has been performed by any one of the administrations, these values will be populated and would need to be removed prior to re-enabling the ADC. The method for deleting these attributes is to re-import the directory information into Exchange 5.5 (one container at a time), adding the value ~DEL into the column that contains the ADC-Global-Names attribute. At a minimum, only the Object-Class, Directory Name and ADC-Global-Names columns need to be specified in the import file.