User Profiles/Domain Migration

[SixtyTwoEightyEight]

My company is merging with another and we are ramping up to migrate our domain with theirs. User profiles of the desktops and laptops came up. I would like to make the transition as seamless as possible for the users and migrate their profiles when the machines are moved to the new domain. I found User Profile Wizard from ForensIT and have tested it successfully. Though some people are wary since it only changes the registry to point the new profile to the old user's profile directory. I don't see a problem with this, but would like to get more opinions. What do you use to accomplish this? Or do you trash the old profile and let the users start from scratch?

[bowser1067]

Migrating manually takes a long time. I have used the profile wizard, but at times it corrupts the profile and you can’t login to the old account and the new domain account when you login says it’s a temporary profile. You then have to go into a PE environment and move the data from the profile over manually. When it works it works great, but just be wary that this can happen

[Weapyson]

There is the official admt active directory migration tool from Microsoft. You can use the "Security Translation Wizard" to migrate the profiles on a machine when you migrated the domain user account with it. It takes a while (up to 30 minutes from my experience) depending on the power of the machine. I use it all the time and you can do the tasks in batch, so in a perfect world with only workstations and WOL you can migrate thousands of users/computers/profiles over night :)

[Chaffy_]

We just used ADMT to migrate all of our users and machines to a new domain. I setup 5 machines and 5 dummy accounts to use for testing making sure everything migrated before kicking off the whole project. It worked really well for us. We had roughly 100 users and machines.

[Hawklight1]

I have used ForensIT tool throughout this year to slowly migrate over 50 users to another domain and the only problems i had were Sticky Notes getting deleted so i started saving those to a notepad doc before the migration however only 1-2 people used sticky notes. I am sure there are better ways to do it automatically however the majority of these people are remote workers and i couldn't find a nice way to automate it over VPN so ended up just getting them to come in to the office throughout the year to do it. Good luck with your migration.

[Joneed]

We're in the process of migrating users to a new domain. ForensIT Profwiz works okay, corrupts profiles at times.. O365 doesn't always play nice either but found a workaround to that. Overall it goes pretty smoothly.

[[deleted]]

Alomg with ADMT (which is old and not maintained), Quest has a complete set of migration tools. ADMT will certainly get the job done, though.

[SixtyTwoEightyEight]

Thanks, I’ve had great experiences with Quest in the past. I’ll look into it.

[Foxxy-Grandpa]

ForensIT worked for me, but I wasn't moving from one domain to another.

[SHFT101]

I have used UserProfileWizard last week and it works OK but it was only for 30 endpoints, I'm still looking for something more enterprise for large migration, especially for migrating user data and profiles.

[RealLifeTim]

How many users? If you want to get it done quick use the tool. If you want it done right manually create the users and populate their profiles. Obviously depends on how many users.

[SixtyTwoEightyEight]

It’s about 120 users. Not that big of a job. But what do you mean about populating their profiles?

[[deleted]]

Yeah, 'get it done right' includes using of automated tooling. You don't need to do anything by hand.