My home office uses a Windows domain that hosts about 25 nodes. There are 17 locations out in the field (70% Windows XP, 30% Windows 7) with anywhere from 4-10 computers that are not joined to this domain and don't exist on a domain. We had decided early on the cost to create and manage the infrastructure to hook into our home office domain was not enough to justify what little we needed it for (they all connect to our web application to do their work anyways.)
However, this creates a big time sink for our (very small) IT department whenever we need to do any kind of maintenance on the field machines. I'd love to see us save some time with a tool or set of practices that will allow us to better manage these systems remotely, even if it is something as simple as managing updates, running commands, or pushing Firefox out to everyone.
What are some good tools/practices to manage this problem for about 150 remote, non-domain nodes? Any software solutions should be recommended knowing that we are a small company with a constrained IT budget.
Best Answer
I personally like AD, but you've already said you've decided against it. So...
Which leaves us with software installs/updates. Money and time spent will be in inverse proportion to each other, in my experience, but your mileage may vary.
Which is why Grant is in favor of Active Directory for software installs. Honestly, I was just absurdly happy when a former employer finally got AD and I could finally stop pushing out registry keys via management software.
There are also (very few) places that do remote desktops as a service (Desktone, Molten, Citrix, Amazon has a beta). You might be a candidate for that. It's definitely worth looking into in your case, IMHO.
What I would recommend is:
Hopefully, at that point, something will start to look right to you. Good luck!