Best Practices

• Ensure that one of the post-upgrade tasks performed is an audit of all services so that servers that need IIS have the service re-enabled after migration.

• Because prototype phases of a project are essential to test the design assumptions for a migration or implementation, create a production domain controller and then isolate it in the lab for testing.

• Test the hardware compatibility of any server that will be directly upgraded to Windows Server 2003 against the published Hardware Compatibility List from Microsoft.

• Because the decision to raise the forest or domain functional levels is final, ensure that there is no additional need to add Windows 2000 domain controllers anywhere in the forest before performing this procedure.

• If the server or servers that hold the OM roles are not directly upgraded to Windows Server 2003 but will instead be retired, move these OM roles to another server.

• When using ADMT, migrate groups into a new domain first to keep users' group membership intact.