I would like some advice on centralising the management of Group Policy within our organisation…

I work for a local authority in the southwest of England and carry out Group Policy admin at 230 schools across the county. Each school has its own unique Windows Server 2003 AD forest with no trusts or links with any other school. We maintain the same Group Policy configuration at every school for the purpose of consistency, but because each site is a separate entity, any updates to GPOs have to be distributed everywhere and applied by scripting.

However… I am currently looking into centrally managing Group Policy at all schools from one single GPMC console. We have a central resource Forest where our Exchange and AV reside and I would like to set up a Group Policy admin server on this central Forest to manage Group Policy at all schools.

I would like to be able to perform the following from the GPMC in our central forest:

* Add all school forests to GPMC console
* Perform GPO copy function (copy new/updated GPOs from test environment [central forest] to production environments [school forests])
* Perform Backup/Import functions between test forest and production forests
* Edit settings within GPOs in remote forests
* Use GPMC scripting to perform common group policy admin functions

Can anyone advise on the best way to achieve this? At present there is no trust between the central forest and the school forests. So what would I need to do to achieve this centralised management model (i.e. configuration of forest trusts etc)?

Just to be clear… I am not looking to enable cross-forest group policy application… I am effectively trying to simplify remote management of group policy. Any suggestions in this regard would be most appreciated as I have been unable to find much documentation on this scenario.