Arguments for 2003 Active directory versus 2000 active directory?

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Guest

We are required to upgrade our single NT 4.0 domain to Active Directory - this has been a long planned process and we are finally ready to proceed. We have a collection of sites that are all part of the domain and we would like to keep our groups structure intact. We are running Exchange 5.5 servers with plans to upgrade to Exchange 2000

What arguments can we use to upgrade to 2003 versus 2000? The biggest benefits I see would be the ability to rename the domain without having to rebuild everything and the ability to migrate users' passwords into the active directory

Suggestions? Comments?
 
Hi!
My opinion is that you should upgrade to Windows 2003. Why? Because that's current version of "Windows". If you upgrade to windows 2000 you soner or later have to upgrade to windows 2003. Do one upgrade instead of two.

Regards,
Jan Gustavsson

----- stephenbbaker wrote: -----

We are required to upgrade our single NT 4.0 domain to Active Directory - this has been a long planned process and we are finally ready to proceed. We have a collection of sites that are all part of the domain and we would like to keep our groups structure intact. We are running Exchange 5.5 servers with plans to upgrade to Exchange 2000.

What arguments can we use to upgrade to 2003 versus 2000? The biggest benefits I see would be the ability to rename the domain without having to rebuild everything and the ability to migrate users' passwords into the active directory.

Suggestions? Comments?
 
Is there a direct upgrade path from NT4 to 2003?

The ability to rename a Domain is nice, but you would not want to
rename a Domain every day. It's scarcely a reason to upgrade to 2003.

Cheers,

Cliff
 
You should be able to upgrade directly. You can either do it in place i.e.
one of your current Nt servers ( I think BDC is the only option for upgrade)
has enough horse power to handle 2003. There is also a util for migrating to
a new server in a new forest (ADMT).



Rick .
 
Since you mentioned having multiple sites, your biggest advantages with 2003
over 2000 will be the improved Inter-Site Topology Generator (generates
replication connections between sites), improved global catalog replication,
more flexible dcpromo options (install from media), and better group
membership replication (link-value replication) - to name a few.

As far as domain rename goes, this is not supported in Exchange 2000/2003 so
you may not want to use that in your argument.....just be sure to carefully
plan you dns domain name before upgrading.

Here are some links with more information about new features and upgrading
to 2003:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/technologies/activedirectory.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/technologies/default.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/whyupgrade/top10w2k.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/whyupgrade/top10nt.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/whyupgrade/nt4/nt4townet.mspx

--
Jimmy Harper [MSFT]
Directory Services
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights



stephenbbaker said:
We are required to upgrade our single NT 4.0 domain to Active Directory -
Click to expand...
this has been a long planned process and we are finally ready to proceed.
We have a collection of sites that are all part of the domain and we would
like to keep our groups structure intact. We are running Exchange 5.5
servers with plans to upgrade to Exchange 2000.
What arguments can we use to upgrade to 2003 versus 2000? The biggest
Click to expand...
benefits I see would be the ability to rename the domain without having to
rebuild everything and the ability to migrate users' passwords into the
active directory.
 
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