Server 2012 Essentials to Standard and Exchange 2013

[BlizzardX]

Evening people,

Slightly strange question I think.

I've got a friend who has asked me to help him setup Exchange 2013 (not a corporate environment, its using his dreamspark sub) with Server 2012. He likes the dashboard from Essentials and would like to keep that functionality.

So I setup essentials, ran the upgrade process to standard, installed all the pre-requisites and other stuff for Exchange, installed exchange 2013 (went fine!) but when I try to log in using an Admin account, even though the account works fine for everything in Server 2012 it refuses to log in to ECP.

I can easily get Standard and exchange to run fine if I use standard straight off, but has anyone looked at the upgrade from essentials to standard and then installed exchange? I can't for the life figure it out!

 

[Deleted User 298457]

I think this behaviour is expected - Essentials and Essentials > Standard are heavily targetted to Office 365. Someone mentioned a while back therefore to have an SBS equivalent, you need a Standard+Exchange server, and Essentials (business requirements dictate whether to upgrade this to standard afterwards).

 

[BlizzardX]

Ah right I wasn't sure as I can get to the ECP login page, just none of my admin accounts can log in and it also cannot connect to the server through the exchange command console...

Looks like Server 2012 R2 has some of the essentials features (dashboard etc) built in so I might suggest he wait till that is released!