About 2 weeks ago, I put the wraps on the task of moving from one Windows domain to another here at NewPointe.  Overall, I would say that the operation went pretty well, and I’m satisfied with the way things progressed.  However, I would make some tweaks to the procedure if I ever had to do it again.

Planning

This is one area that I think, for as much as I knew about domain migrations at the time, we did pretty well with.  Our staff was notified of the changes that they would experience during the migration, account passwords were pre-created and form-mailed to each user (on paper), and the migration itself took place between Christmas and New Years, when the office is least populated.

Now that I know a little more about what’s going on during a domain rebuild, I would definitely communicate with the end-users more about what they would be experiencing.  We didn’t have a LOT of surprised users, but I would still like to keep the "gotchas" down to a minimum next time.

User Account Migration

For this project, because of my almost non-existant timeline, I decided to hand-create all the accounts, groups, and OUs on the new domain.  I didn’t mess with the AD Migration Tool for a couple reasons:  1.)  I had plenty of time to get my accounts created on the new domain, and 2.) I had no idea how reliable ADMT would be.  I definitely want to give it a try in a lab though.  If it works, fantastic … it will cut down drastically on the time it takes to create user accounts during a migration.

ExMerge

ExMerge, without a doubt, was the biggest stumbling block through the process.  I spent a total of 8 hours JUST on ExMerge, moving data from one Exchange server to another.  Since ExMerge can be run as an incremental operation, I should have run ExMerge a week before, and maybe a day before as well, to get data moved over ahead of time.  I would have cut some MAJOR time off of the operation.

Scripting

There’s a LOT of scripting I could have done to make this job easier, from file permissions to moving profiles around.  One thing I’ve realized is that I need to at LEAST learn VBscript so I can write some time-saving scripts.

In conclusion, I would say that a domain rebuild is definitely not something you want to jump into if you’re not sure you’ll need it.  There was much lost sleep over the event, and I’m definitely glad it’s over.  As I said before though, I’m generally pleased with how it went.  I’d be happy to answer any questions that anybody may have regarding the project, as well.