News

Active Directory Migration Tool 3.2 Released

• By Kurt Mackie
• 06/22/2010

Microsoft on Friday released an updated Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) tool to help with migrations.

The new Active Directory Migration Tool version 3.2 (ADMT 3.2) is designed as an aid for IT pros when they need to combine groups of domains, as might be required when two organizations get combined. It can also be used to set up user accounts following company mergers and acquisitions.

According to the download page for ADMT 3.2, the tool can be used to "migrate users, groups, service accounts, and computers between AD DS domains in different forests (inter-forest migration) or between AD DS domains in the same forest (intra-forest migration)." In AD DS nomenclature, "trees" are defined as a collection of one or more domains, while "forests" are considered to be supersets or collections of trees.

The new tool can also be used to "perform security translation (to migrate local user profiles) when performing inter-forest migrations," according to Microsoft's download page.

Version 3.2 loses support for Windows Server 2000. This version of the tool supports migrations only on Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 --  for both the source domain and the target domain.

The tool comes with an agent that can be run on various Windows client and server operating systems. The agent will install on "Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2," according to Microsoft's announcement.

Microsoft also released a 264-page guide this month that describes how to migrate and restructure AD domains using ADMT 3.1 or ADMT 3.2. The guide can be downloaded here (Word doc).