How to change Exchange Virtual Directories without reconfiguring Outlook clients?

Question

I'm planning some changes to an exchange setup at one of our clients.

They want to migrate from Exchange 2013 to Exchange 2019.

The FQDN they use for Exchange 2013 internal and external has a wildcard SSL certificate, naming is "server1.company.com"

The issue now is that the FQDN used for Exchange is also used for various other services as someone in the past installed all sort of other tools and services on the Exchange 2013 server itself.

This prevents me from simply pointing the FQDN to a new Exchange 2019 server and move mailboxes as this will break many other tools in the domain that also connect to "server1.company.com"

The plan we have for now is to first reconfigure Exchange 2013 to use a brand new URL like "mail.company.com" I know how to change the Virtual Directories but I'm struggling to find how this will impact all existing connections from Outlook to "server1.company.com". Is there a way to trick Outlook to update to "**mail.**company.com" without me having to reconfigure all Outlook profiles?

The idea is that if this is successful, we can then install the new Exchange 2019 in the domain and point this new DNS record to the Exchange 2019 server. The old "server1.company.com" will still work for services remaining there, and the email will be separate accessible using "mail.company.com"

The client wants me to find the least annoying for their existing users.. Any tips on this?

Answer 1

Hi @Caspar - ABO ，

 

Based on my experience, normally Outlook usage won’t be affected when you change the Virtual directory URLs. Just make sure the DNS records for “mail.company.com” are added properly in your scenario. If you still have concerns on this, you can make the change at non-working hours.

Here is the result of running Test E-mails AutoConfiguration after I experimentally modified the internal Autodiscover URL. The original url was using the FQDN of my Exchange server, I changed it to “mail.contoso.com” and added the corresponding DNS record. I kept Outlook running during the whole process and didn’t experience any issue. The output of Test E-mails AutoConfiguration indicates the new Autodiscover url is being used successfully:

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