tremendously and I hope others find it to be beneficial as well.
After all is said and done, I feel we may stick with ARD for now in our
current set up since we are only going to have about 50 laptops in the
building this year. Also, being a one to one program, I don't see the real
need to spend the extra time and energy integrating the macs into our AD
since the students will be the only users of their laptops. Each year we
are going to roll out more macbooks to other grades and our school will also
continue to grow; at that point I will most likely be investing in an os x
server.
For a reference point, I have included below an extremely brief comparative
analysis of the products out there to help with mac network integration.
GroupLogic - ExtremeZ-IP
-Needs Windows Server Software
-Manages file/printer sharing
-One time set up fee
JAMF Software - Casper Suite
-Needs Mac OS X Server Software
-All in one solution including inventory, imaging, file/printer sharing,
licenses
-Subscription based and includes two days of training
Thursby Software - ADmitMac
-Installs on client machines
-AD integration and file/print sharing
All of these softwares are a little too pricey for our current needs.
Jason, I definitely will take your word of warning into consideration and I
hope I am not missing something crucial that will end up coming back to
haunt me. I'm aware now that ARD has its limitations, but on the other hand
there is no out of the box windows equivalent that is as fully featured as
ARD.
Thanks again to everyone and please feel free to add in any more comments or
suggestions at any time.
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