Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 Public Folders

Question

Hi Gurus, I’m in the process of moving public folders from Exch03 to Exch2010 and I have some clarifications before I proceed with this task. As I have understood the replication process between public folders working in a multi-master environment, I still
need some deep understanding. Okay, the task is to ensure that we don’t lose any PF when I remove the last Exch03 where there’s a lot of PF residing. From my understanding, these PFs found at Exch03 are only replicas from Exch2010. From testing I can verify
that the Outlook clients are looking at Exch2010. The way I tested this is by creating a test PF from Outlook and it did reflected on Exch2010 PF. Looking Exch03 for a couple of days, the test PF never reflected there so I'm just just assuming that there's
no replication happening between Exch2010 and Exch2010.
Please verify on this. Does it mean that Exch2010 is not replicating to Exch03?
If yes, if I remove the PFs from Exch2003 without moving the replicas first to Exch2010, like plainly removing them for decommission, will that delete/remove the PFs on Exch2010?
I have a feeling that it don’t because the PFs I’m creating/deleting at Exch03 are all replicas and I don't see any of the PFs that I deleted at Exch03 to also get deleted at Exch2010. More likely the PFs I'm creating at Exch2010 are not replication across
to Exch03 and therefore removing these PFs at Exch03 should not affect the PFs at Exch2010.
Please confirm on this before I proceed.
Note that I've already taken copy of these Exchange servers because these are all VMs.
Thanks....

Answer 1

Hi,
When you add Exchange 2010 to the replica list on Exchange 2003 server, it will replicate the Exchange 2003 Public Folder hierarchy and content to Exchange 2010, not from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2003.
You can remove public folders on Exchange 2003 without affecting the public folders which have been replicated to Exchange 2010.
Before you decide to remove Exchange 2003 server, I recommend you put the Exchange 2003 server offline temporarily to check if Exchange 2010 works well.
Best regards,
Belinda
Belinda Ma
TechNet Community Support