Scott Feltmann's Blog

I was recently uninstalling MS Exchange 2003 and came across the following error message:

The component “Microsoft Exchange Messaging and Collaboration Services” cannot be assigned the action “Remove” because:
One or both of the groups “Exchange Domain Servers” or “Exchange Enterprise Servers” in this domain have been moved or renamed from the default name and/or location.  Microsoft Exchange does not support moving or renaming these groups.  You must restore these groups to their original names and locations.

To resolve this issue I went into Active Directory Users and Computers and did a search on the entire tree for “Exchange”.  Once there I located the groups “Exchange Domain Servers” and “Exchange Enterprise Servers”.  I right clicked on both of those groups one at a time and did a move and targeted their Default OU which is the USERS OU located under the root.

Once those two security groups were back in their default OU (Users) Exchange was able to start the uninstall process.

I hope this helps someone out there considering there are a number of people still on Exchange 2003 and getting ready to move to 2007/2010. 

I came across an interesting note on the Exchange 2010 ActiveSync and Exchange 2003

Users who have mailboxes on an Exchange 2003 server who try to use Exchange ActiveSync through an Exchange 2010 Client Access server will receive an error and be unable to synchronize unless Integrated Windows authentication is enabled on the Microsoft-Server-ActiveSync virtual directory on the Exchange 2003 server. This enables the Exchange 2010 Client Access server and the Exchange 2003 back-end server to communicate using Kerberos authentication.

 Proxying isn’t supported between virtual directories that use Basic authentication. For client communications to be proxied between virtual directories on different servers, the virtual directories must use Integrated Windows authentication. 

 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310763(EXCHG.140).aspx