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What would be the recommended strategy in the following situation merging two separate companies into a single AD with a new AD domain name? Current thinking is to somehow merge everything onto a brand new 2008 domain, main concerns are user and exchange merge/migration.

The two setups are:

The first is a larger windows 2003 AD (previously upgraded from 2000) with multiple servers running share point 2007, exchange 2003, IIS, terminal server 2003 and SQL server 2005. Supporting about 100 users and multiple applications.

The second is a smaller domain running SBS 2008 with Exchange and about 25 users. No other servers or services apart from fileshares to worry about.

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Of course, SBS makes things much more complicated. Research this all before you do it. I'm not perfect but I've done similar things in the past. Here's your basic plan of action:

  1. Setup a new Domain Controller with the new AD name
  2. Join another server to this domain and install Exchange on this domain
  3. Create a trust between the 2003 AD and the new AD
  4. Install Active Directory Migration Tool on the new DC and migrate all users and computers to the new domain. You probably want to review the ADMT guide for how to properly do this. It also shows you how to use the Password Export Server to migrate passwords with accounts. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6D710919-1BA5-41CA-B2F3-C11BCB4857AF&displaylang=en
  5. Move mailboxes by following this article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997145%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx
  6. Setup dns forwarders on the new domain and SBS domain to point to each other
  7. Create domain administrator accounts on new domain and SBS domain that use the same username and password

  8. Run ADMT on the new DC using this command and migrate SBS users and computers to new domain. It's been a little while since I've done a migration like this. I seem to remember the command being slightly different because ADMT 3.1 installed itself in a different location. Check that if you have trouble with this command. Check out this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/05/01/sbs-2003-to-sbs-2008-migration-to-a-different-domain-name.aspx

    Runas /NetOnly /user:SBSdomainname\AdministratorAccount "MMC \"%windir%\ADMT\Migrator.msc\""

  9. Run export-mailbox on the SBS server and import-mailbox on the new Exchange server to move the mailboxes (I don't think there's an automatic way of doing this with SBS)

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