When the time comes where you need to transition from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, depending on the size of your organization, it can take weeks, months or in some cases even years to complete the transition. During the co-existence period, you would need to manage both Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 users, groups, servers and so on. Since some Exchange 2007 objects must be managed using the Exchange 2007 Management Console or Shell and most Exchange 2010 objects must be managed using the Exchange 2010 Management console or Shell, it would be nice if you could just install both management tool version on the same machine right? Guess what? Yes this is in fact possible.

Just install the prerequisites for the Exchange 2010 Management tools. Then install the Exchange 2010 Management tools followed by the Exchange 2007 Management tools.

You can now open the management tools for both versions from the start menu as shown below.

You can even have the management tools for each version run side by side.

And since  both Exchange 2007 and 2010 management tools are based on MMC 3.0, you could as well add the respective snap-in for each version to the same MMC console.

You can of course also run each version of the Exchange Management Shell by side.

Pretty cool huh?

- Henrik Walther