question about network domains

i work at a small business (<10 employees) we don't have an IT person, so the responsibilities typically fall on the most tech savvy person (usually me).

i am setting up a server and would like to do it in such a way to anticipate becoming part of a larger organization. i would like to set the domain as 'department.company.local' - thinking later on it will be added to, a now nonexistent, 'company.local' domain. can i do this? and how would it be done? thanks.

i have access to server 2008 (32bit/64bit), server 2008 r2, and small business server 2008 (<- i would like to stay away from this one, if possible)

 

Are you going to need to access the server outside of the office? If so are you going to use VPN or std browsing access? If internal you can use just about anything. Once you allow outside access every thing changes when it comes to security. Just want you thinking about these when someone with more experience with this chimes in.

 

it is an internal network. i can get everything set up and working, no problem. since the server is a global catalog domain controller in 'department.company.local' domain, how can i add it to 'company.local' as a child domain, that already has a global catalog domain controller?

we would farm this out, but we already did once, and they borked us. if we can figure this out, it'll save us the money. this is all very new to me, but i'm slowly fumbling through it...

 

You can't just add an existing domain to a forest. You have to create a two-way forest trust, create the subdomain in the other company's forest, then migrate over objects from your forest to the sub-domain.
ADMT is the tool you want to read up on to do this.

 

@ Aerick

fantastic! thank you very much!