Merging two forests

[Jeff Meyers]

I've recently taken over the task of managing the
Microsoft Network at our company. Primarily we use a
Netware 5.1 network for file storage and authentication,
but we do have two small W2k server forests. I'm looking
for a way to join the two forests together for centralized
administration. I am relatively new to Active Directory,
but I do have a good understanding of the concepts.

Here is the senario:

A bank with two forests:
1 forest with 1 domain "Loan Processing"
1 forest with 1 domain "Item Processing"

I would like to join these two forests together if
possible without recreating all of the
users/groups/permissions of one of the forests into the
other forest.

Is there any way to do this?

 

[Jimmy Andersson [MVP]]

You can use ADMTv2 to migrate the users to the other forest. Another way is
to create a federated forest, basically it means that you create a forest
trust between the forests,available in Windows Server 2003, this will not
merge the forests but you will be able to share resources between them.

Regards,
/Jimmy