Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Best Practices

Upgrading Between Active Directory Forests

We decided to include a section on this topic because it is frequently addressed in our contact with customers. Right now, we know of at least three implementations that need to move content from a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 farm that resides in one Active Directory forest to a SharePoint Server 2007 farm that will reside in a different Active Directory forest.

To be honest, SharePoint Products and Technologies doesn’t upgrade well at all when it is moved between forests. While recent patches from Microsoft have given SharePoint Server 2007 the ability to recognize the SID History attribute in a migrated user account, the reality is that there isn’t a clean way to do this.

At the time of this writing, ...