A large organization has an Active Directory setup with lots of divisions and groups. They have legacy custom applications built around the Active Directory in PHP etc. Now they want all custom applications to be migrated to ASP.NET. My first concern to do this is to replicate Active directory off the production system onto my development machines. Is there a tool that can export a win 2003 Active directory with its structure and data, and enable the same to be imported on a blank Win 2003 installation, to create the same production environment on dev machines?? Any guidance, pointers would be appreciated. I always think tomorrow will have more time than today. And every today seems to pass-by faster than yesterday. Rahul Singla | http://www.rahulsingla.com

Hello, have a look here about creating a test environment from production: http://www.pbbergs.com/windows/articles/TestDomain.html http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorge/archive/2005/11/19/105.aspx http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorge/archive/2005/11/19/107.aspxBest regards Meinolf Weber Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.

hmm, we have an approach where we have a second domain, using same netbios name for the domain but different dns name (like company,local vs company.development). so scripts can sue the same name and server name but the environment is pyhsically seperated. if for your approach you would have a seperated environment as well, you could try to make a backup of your dc with ntbackup and restore it on the seperated machine and go form there. if its mostly about the users, you could try build in tools like ldifde (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727091.aspx) to export import the objects