Assignment 2: Managing a Merger
Due Week 10 and worth 150 points

Imagine you work for Quality Corporation (Quality.ad) who has just recently bought Crescent Inc. (Crescent.ad) in a recent merger. Quality and Crescent have separate offices in St. Louis (Quality HQ), Little Rock, and Austin (Crescent HQ). Crescent also has offices in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Santa Fe. The desire is to establish trusts between the two (2) AD forests and consolidate core services (DNS, DHCP, etc.) as soon as possible. Both companies are running Server 2012 as Domain Controllers. Their primary DNS, DHCP, and Domain Controller servers are in the two (2) corporate headquarters with secondary servers located in the other cities to reduce latency.

For the Quality.ad domain, the Flexible Single Master Operation (FMSO) roles are located on Server01, which is located at the Quality HQ. For the Crescent.ad domain, the FSMO roles are located on RWDC01, which is located at the Crescent HQ. In addition, the Quality.ad domain has several servers configured as a Certificate Authority, and the Crescent.ad domain has a single Certificate Authority.

During this acquisition, you will need to consider the following:

• The Crescent Inc. has developed several enhancements for the widgets that your company produces. The engineering documents are installed on the ServerDocs located at the Austin office. You will need to configure the necessary systems so that the engineers from Quality Corporation can access these documents. Since these documents are considered proprietary and highly confidential, you must ensure that no other users except the two (2) engineering teams can access these documents and that the documents stay within the company.
• For both organizations, all user IDs and digital certificates from the other organization must be recognized. 

Write a six to eight (6-8) page paper in which you:

1. Explain the key considerations behind establishing trust relationships between the two (2) domains.
2. Suggest a method for consolidating Core Network services.
3. Provide a plan for integrating both AD forests eliminating duplication of service wherever possible.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Describe, manage, and install Active Directory replication, federation services, and certificate services.
• Demonstrate the ability to plan an advanced AD, DHCP, and DNS solution.
• Describe and plan for configuring a domain and forest as well as configuring trusts.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in advanced network infrastructure environments.
• Write clearly and concisely about advanced network infrastructure topics using proper writing mechanics and technical style conventions.