I have been charged with distributing about a dozen laptops to technicians at our company that will spend almost all of their time in the field not connected to our network.
They may come in for quarterly meetings and may or may not connect their laptops to the network.
My question is what are the benefits or disadvantages of joining these laptops to our domain and under these circumstances (given what I describe above) what would you do?
Best Answer
This sounds more like a preference things to me, I say this because
1) Does your company have a terminal server?
2) Do they have VPN access from outside?
3) Do you have RPC over http setup on your mail server?
4) Do they need constant access to their user data and more importantly company data while outside the office?
Answering these questions will answer your question for you
I would not, I would give them VPN access and set up a Terminal Server for them to use.
I would setup their Microsoft Outlook to use the RPC over http connection.
Then I would make sure there username and password on their laptop is the same as the one on the server, that way while they are in office they can access their email and shares without logging into the domain, and setup a login script batch file they can run from their desktop to map drives whether logged in via VPN or local.
HTH