# merging Active Directory Domains



## mccarron (May 1, 2006)

Just migrated my old 2000 server to 2008 standard edition. I was just told that after the first of the year, we will be merging with a company even smaller than ours. They are running a 2000 server. Both mine and theirs are primary controllers. They have such a small staff that I would just manually add them to our system, but I have discovered that they are running software that will not run on 2008 that they need to continue to use.

I need to join this server to my network so that our staff and theirs can run apps on both machines.

What's the easiest way to proceed. I have already run ADPREP on 2000 server.
They are running DNS, DHCP, File sharing and sqlserver on theirs. We are running DNS, File sharing, IIS and SQLserver. We do not use DHCP and I will be putting static address on their workstations.


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## mister_man (Dec 30, 2009)

If you need to leave their system intact for the sake of their programs and logins, I think your best bet is to creat a 2 way trust between the two domains. That is a simple way to get to where you need to get.
This is done from the Active Directory tool available in Administrators Tools.


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## mccarron (May 1, 2006)

I have confirmation from the vendor of the old products that they will soon support 2008. If I put the trust in should I start amking login for these new clients on the new system or will I have to move all logins and permission at once. Can the same user exist on both domains. If I give them permissions to my system using logins to the old system will I again have to create everything over again.


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## mister_man (Dec 30, 2009)

Once the two way trust is in place the users on the other domain and on your domain would have cross domain abilities. This means for now, the users of the other domain would login as normal to their workstations until you migrate them into your domain. For migration into your domain use Microsoft ADMT. Here is a nice article on using it. http://therealshrimp.blogspot.com/2009/04/admt-plain-and-simple.html.


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