Single Label Active Directory configuration

Its recently come to light that many of the new Microsoft products will not support configuration in a Single Label Active Directory (SLD), this configuration is where Active Directory domains and DNS name is simply named ‘Customer’ rather than ‘Customer.Com’ or ‘Customer.local’ – this is a fairly common practice for older Active directory implementations where the AD design may not have followed best practise.

  

The following products don’t work well/at all with an SLD

·         Microsoft Lync server, does not support SLD’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2379369/en-us

·         Microsoft Exchange 2010, supports currently but does not like SLD’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2269838/en-us

Renaming the SLD to a proper namespace will not work, Migration solutions like the ones from Quest Software are the only valid way to migrate a non conformant SLD domain into one that will be supported with modern Microsoft server products http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300684/en-us, as many Microsoft server products will not function after a domain name change to fix the above problem.  

At the current time there is no solution to this issue other than to use a Migration solution such as Quest Migration Manager for Active Directory.