Well I finally decided to think about using Windows Vista, we have a copy of it at work for use with our MSDN Subscription. So I commandeered a decent laptop with plenty of RAM and good processor and installed Vista on it.
The install was pretty straight forward, installed the OS, installed the drivers, installed some updates and we were ready to rock and roll.
I then installed the Active Directory Tools, these went on no bother. Then I thought I'll install ESM 2003, now, as this needs IIS 6/IIS 5 installed I thought I'll install IIS. question was where? I opened up control panel went to find Add/Remove Programs... .... where was it??? found out I had to go to Programs in control panel and then Turn on or off Windows Features.
So I install IIS and then tried ESM 2003 but....
... the computer said NO. you need to have IIS Admin tools installed. Which I had done.
So I did a google on "Exchange 2003 Management Console and Vista "
And found this link:
http://forums.microsoft.com/technet/showpost.aspx?postid=946915&siteid=17&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0
And it said:
"The Exchange Management Console and Exchange Management Shell are not currently supported on Vista (and for that matter, neither is Exchange System Manager from previous versions of Exchange). Support for Vista for the Exchange 2007 tools will be provided in a future service pack. "
I mean what are Microsoft thinking, if we want to keep up to date with the OS etc... we cannot do our job as a System Admin if their products do not support previous versions of their own products.
Any way back to the problem. There is no actual way to get ESM running on your Vista Machine, but what you can do is manually register certain DLL's to give you the Exchange Tabs in Active Directory Users and Computers.
The only other way to get to the ESM is to either RDP on to your Exchange Server or install a Virtual XP Machine to run some of your Admin tools.
What you need to copy to your %systemroot%\system32 folder:
- From your Exchange\BIN folder in my case: G:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\BIN\
- address.dll
- escprint.dll
- exchmem.dll
- glblname.dll
- maildsmx.dll
- pttrace.dll
- From the %systemroot%\System32 on the Exchange Server:
- netui0.dll
- netui1.dll
- netui2.dll
- the DLL you need to register is the maildsmx.dll, to do this you will need to create the following CMD file:
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\maildsmx.dll
Save the CMD file as maildsmx.cmd in to your documents folder and then browse to the folder and right click the CMD file and select Run as administrator.
