Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT): Your Essential Guide

The Active Directory Migration Tool (ADMT) is a Microsoft utility that is used to migrate Active Directory objects between domains in a Windows environment. It is often used to consolidate multiple domains into a single domain, to merge two separate domains into one, or to move objects from one domain to another. It’s a tool that companies often use considering how common such migrations are as of late.

ADMT can migrate everything from users, trees, security protocols and everything in between. Pretty much everything that has some kind of attributes on the server is something that ADMT can move and it’s something that the company will want moved rather than have to recreate all of those finely tuned settings again.

Why is Active Directory Migration done?

You may be wondering what even is the point of doing such migrations considering that they can have a pretty big impact on the company during the process such as downtime and similar things. Well the thing is that oftentimes servers need replacing and other upgrades need to be made and in these cases it’s pretty much necessary to migrate everything.

If you were to make all the processes from scratch for the company then that would be at least 10x more costly than the downtime of the migration. These processes were carefully curated through years, it’s hard to redo them all at once.

What are the benefits of using ADMT?

ADMT has quite a few benefits which causes it to be an often used program in large companies. Let’s cover some of the most important ones.

The first big reason is the fact that it allows the company to more easily merge or consolidate multiple domains into one which allows you to more efficiently use resources and make the network a bit simpler to use. They also provide far greater security when compared to some of their competitors and considering that you don’t want company secrets to come out that’s quite important.

It’s also quite simple to use which means that if the team that will be doing the migration is missing a member or two then it won’t take nearly as long to teach them how to use the program than if you were to say use a different one that may be more complex. It’s quite hard to find programs that are both easier to use and also better than their competitors but here is an example of one.

What are the potential drawbacks of using ADMT?

As with anything in life ADMT does have some drawbacks so let’s cover them.

While we did say that it’s easier to use than competitors it’s still hard to deny that migrating active directories is a complex process and a bit of a pain in the neck, it’s simply impossible to avoid that. There is also the fact that whenever you decide to do a migration there is bound to be some downtime for the company which can cause loss of profits temporarily.

There are also some limitations as ADMT can’t migrate everything, such as certain security protocols so you will have to redo at least a small part of that after the migration is done.

Best practices for using ADMT

• Make a plan – active directory migration is a big and complex process, you’re bound to struggle and get lost if you don’t make a comprehensive plan
• Communicate – it’s important that you communicate with the departments being migrated to see what their potential needs are so that you can sort those out 

Conclusion

Active Directory Migration is never an easy task to have to do. Even if you do everything right there is a decent chance that you’ll run into some kind of issues, or perhaps some departments may have requests that are hard to pull off, or they give you these requests after you’ve already migrated them. Whatever the case is we can assure you that using ADMT will cause your headaches to be lessened.

We hope this small starter guide will help you run into fewer issues when you go through the process yourself and hopefully you’ll be able to fulfill all the requests within the company. We wish you the best of luck.