Active directory question

[waelkd]

Hye

Guys whats the point of joining a server domain? i mean why would i wanna create a domain controller on my server and let people join it. why not create user and group policies on every laptop.

And 2nd lets say i have 80 employees that joined my server domain aka active directory . and all of their laptops are freshly installed with windows 7 pro. but none of them have Microsoft office installed on their laptops. If i install Microsoft office 2010 on the active directory server, will all of my clients have access to Microsoft office 2010 given that it's only installed on the server and they all have domain access to it?

Thanks

 

[usrhome]

Hye

Guys whats the point of joining a server domain? i mean why would i wanna create a domain controller on my server and let people join it. why not create user and group policies on every laptop.

And 2nd lets say i have 80 employees that joined my server domain aka active directory . and all of their laptops are freshly installed with windows 7 pro. but none of them have Microsoft office installed on their laptops. If i install Microsoft office 2010 on the active directory server, will all of my clients have access to Microsoft office 2010 given that it's only installed on the server and they all have domain access to it?

Thanks

It's to have a central point of management and control over your PCs. Instead of creating users and group policies on each computer, you can do them all from the DC saving A LOT of time. Also, Exchange integrates with AD and is very powerful. There's a lot more AD can do, but those are the basic reasons for using it.

No, you would need to install office on each computer. To be able to install it only the server and have other computers use it, you would need something like Xenapp to do that and it's definitely not cheap.

If all computers were on a domain, you could setup a startup script to install office when they reboot. It's a bit of a pain to setup, but it's doable. You can also push out software with AD. All they have to do is restart the computer and it will auto-install. We push Java, Adobe Reader and Flash as well as some other.

If you are able to use AD, USE IT.

 

[broseephus]

Another point on the office portion,

If you want to connect to a server to use Microsoft Office, you will ALSO need a Microsoft Office with Terminal Services rights for EACH user that connects.

It will be much cheaper in the end to just buy 80 copies of office.