Long story short, we moved to Google Apps last summer. Kept exchange up for awhile just to cover ourselves. Now we're at the point where we want to free up the VM host resources. I've never done this before but from what I read I just need to remove all the user mailboxes, and including the arbitration mailboxes and then just uninstall from control panel. That's not the part I'm concerned about though.
I've been doing some testing with disabling the accounts (because we still need the user objects in AD of course) but it also removes the mail attribute which is actually what GADS (Google apps directory sync) uses to pull in our users for their mailboxes on that side of things.
Is it possible to do this without any down time? I understand I can export the mail attribute from my users and re-add them after the fact, but I would like to avoid anytime account downtime/disables on the google side if possible.
Thanks for any insight.