Migrate tree from a forest ...

Cut down the old growth.

usually you use the ADMT for restructuring an Active Directory environment.

Planning is the key as with anything but you've asked what the best practice would be and to answer that what I'll say one must understand core concepts of domains, forests and trees in Active Directory, how Active Directory works, how DNS services work because Active Directory relies upon DNS to function,, along with trust relationships between domains, trees and forests and Active Directory partitioning, and restructuring before one attempts at migration or restructuring.

For that basic knowledge set I'll suggest reading the following MS KB article on Forests, domains and trees in a MS Active Directory Environment. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310996/en-us

I recommend you also read up on the ADMT for restructuring an Active Directory environment.

here's a link on downloading the ADMT which provides a brief intro of what it's used for. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?

I'll also suggest going to Tech Net for white papers on most things Active Directory.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

Yes CGIT, thank you for the response. It is my mistake I was not too explicit in my question. I am very well aware what can be done with ADMT (in fact I used it for many migrations I've done - NT4 to W2K3, forest to forest, domain to forest etc). I will let the question open for another week, then I'll close it, and the points are yours. It?s a pity I can't split the points between you guys (you and the ones that might answer to my question), but ...

Best Practice with anything Active Directory is make it simple.

Management sometimes doesn't like IT saying well ya know, we can but..... they just want the yes we can, but there does come times when management wants something that just isn't feasible. pruning trees and creating multiple forests, multiple trees, multiple domain structure is just asking for trouble.

This question was closed by the author