Forest / Domain restructure advice - aquisition

[Stevehewitt]

Hi Guys,

We are a UK based, pretty much single site business with a single domain running Windows 2008 R2 for our DC's and have about 500 staff. We also use Exchange 2007, SQL Server 2005/2008 and Sharepoint 2007. All rely on AD for authentication.

An American company recently brought us and wants us to integrate our IT. I'm curious as to the best way to do this in terms of AD. They have a single domain as well and are a similar size to us. They have no presence outside the UK.

In addition, we will be adding another site in the UK, as well as taking over sites based in Europe.


With all this in mind, I'm unsure what to suggest in terms of merging the AD infrastructure. We could just do a forest trust and use GALSync for Exchange, however I feel we will want tighter intergration than this.

Therefore what's the best way forward? Would renaming our domain to child.parent.corp and becoming a child domain be the easiest? How would we go about merging the two any other way if forest links wouldn't be enough intergration?

Any advice, experience on general tips appreciated.

Thanks,



Steve.

"They have the internet on computers now!" - Homer Simpson

 

[kmcferrin]

The consultant answer: it depends.

It depends on the level of integration requried. If you can get by with Forest Trusts or Federation or something similar then I'd go with that since it is likely to be simpler. That assumes that the former individual companies will continue to have their own IT support that will be responsible for their infrastructure. If they want things more tightly integrated with a more "shared services" model then they'll probably want to do full migrations. Of course that will be expensive, so there's always the option of designing/building a new forest structure (or using the parent company's) and migrating users to the new structure, then leaving the old forests up and running with forest trusts until such time as the servers/resources in them are rebuilt/upgraded, at which point they would be built in the "new"/parent forest.

But there are many ways to slice it, all based on requirements.

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