XADM: You Can Join an Exchange 5.5 Site That Has an Invalid Character in Its Name to an Exchange 2000 Organization

When you join a Microsoft Exchange 5.5 site to an existing Exchange 2000 organization, and the name of the Exchange 5.5 site contains a character that is invalid for use in an Exchange 2000 organization, you receive no warning about the invalid character.

Additionally, after you join the Exchange 5.5 site to the Exchange 2000 organization, you may experience the following issues:

• X.400 Connectors that you create between the Exchange 5.5 site and the Exchange 2000 site become corrupted.
• The newly added Exchange 5.5 site is visible to Exchange 5.5 servers throughout the organization, but Exchange 2000 servers do not recognize the site.

This issue occurs when you create a new Exchange 5.5 site and then join it to an existing Exchange 2000 organization.

To work around this issue, follow these steps:

1. Remove the Directory Replication Connector between the Exchange 5.5 site and the Exchange 2000 organization.
2. Remove the site connector between the Exchange 5.5 site and the Exchange 2000 organization.
3. Rename the Exchange 5.5 site.
4. Re-create the directory replication connector.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

When you try to join an Exchange Server 5.5 site that contains an invalid character in its name to an Exchange 2000 organization, you expect to receive an error message similar to the following: Valid characters for organization and site names in Exchange Server include:

• A through Z
• a through z
• 0 through 9
• Space
• Hyphen or dash