Apple & Microsoft - integration heaven revisited

In this previous post I commented about the native Active Directory integration built-in to the Max OS X operating system. After a few more weeks use, I'm still impressed that Apple have achieved this, but have been introduced to a new product called ADmitMac from Thursby Software. It's clear that a the extended abilities this application brings to the Mac environment have been driven by people experienced in managing an environment that is predominantly Microsoft, with a minority of Macs to support.

It took me an hour or two to go through the Administrator Guide and Installation Guide, but once done I had a good appreciation of the various options and their impact on the Macs and on the AD network.

Once installed and configured, any AD user can authenticate with the domain and login on the Mac. If a path to a network drive has been entered in the User Profile tab in Active Directory Users and Computers, that location becomes the local profile store for any modifications made to the desktop, such as adding files and folders.

If there is no path specified in Active Directory Users and Computers, then a local profile is created and stored in the local drive. I originally wanted to have all Macs saving their profile data straight to the server, but this impacts have the MacBooks can be used. The documentation clearly states that the MacBooks must be set to local profile, I assume because you can't locally cache the network profile. This in itself is no great problem - the network share access will just be there as a backup. Any files they want to backup will have to be dropped on the network share.

It's a great step forward in connecting Apple Mac computers to Microsoft Active Directory domains.