Migrating from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013

While evaluating MS Office 2016, an updated applied enforced the MS rule of only going back 2 versions of Exchange with Outlook.  Once day Outlook 2016 running off Exchange 2007 worked fine, the next day it didn't.  Well damn, I guess we'll be upgrading to Exchange 2013 now!

So far all I've done is set up a new VM (Server 2012 R2), installed all the system requirements and prerequisites, downloaded/installed Exchange 2013 and put on CU9.  Well, I guess that's pretty much everything to at least get it up and running on the latest version.

I have never done a new Exchange installation before and certainly never set one up with an existing, older version running.  So I'm getting help from a consultant I use from time to time when I want to make sure I don't end up making things worse.  He can't get in for a couple of weeks so I'll update this once he has gotten everything set up the way it needs to be for this to work and so I can start migrating mailboxes.

To be continued.....