AD Consolidation

[James Tulk]

We are currently negotiating an outsourcing agreement with our parent
company for IT services (much to my disgust !! ;-). They are proposing
that we migrate out current AD domain from our forest into their
forest and consolidate resources.

Questions are;

1. How problematic is it likely to be migrating all our
users/permissions/etc from our domain into a new domain in another
forest.

2. In the event that the decision were ever reversed and we were to
'insource' our IT services again, where would we stand with
re-creating our forest? Is it possible to export the data from the
domain in their forest out to a new forest? Would we be stuck with
manually re-creating all the users/objects/permissions in the new
forest? I know it's not possible to move a domain between forests, so
this worries me !!

Any comments/ideas/suggestions would be much appriciated !!

Cheers

James

 

[Simon Geary]

You can use ADMTv2 to move users, groups and computers between domains in
different forests. As this would be an inter-forest migration the accounts
in the source domain would remain intact so if the decision was ever
reversed you would just need to migrate back objects that were created since
the move.
It's all possible in theory but is a big undertaking.