One of the deployment scenarios that we were pretty naive about in SPS 2003 was the deployment of SPS in the enterprise with multiple forests. Part of why that happened was because we miscalculated how we thought AD deployments would happen.

At the beginning of the O11 planning cycle (spring 2001), we asked the AD guys about what we should support and we got a clear message that we should be targeting single forests (not because multiple forests didn’t exist, but because the AD team was encouraging folks to move to a single forest). Near the end of the release cycle of O11 (summer 2003), it was pretty clear multiple forests were going to be with us for a long time. That left us with very little time to address this deployment scenario.

You can see this naivete in two different places:

People picker
Can only pick from one forest, the one in which the Sharepoint Server is deployed on

Profiles and MySites
Create a MySite and Profile page for each account even though they are for the same person
Org. Charts on the profile page contain incomplete or duplicate entries
Audience targeting works inconsistently for folks who have multiple login accounts

So what are we going to do about it?

First we reduced the many multi-forest topologies to two basic types:

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