Anyone has experience combining local users with managed user?

Question

I thought this would be pretty common. We started with each user being a local admin user (12 mac systems in the office). We now got a snow leopard server and wanted to migrate everyone to a Open Directory user. We did hours and hours of research and found a few supported way to do this but having some problems....One way was to send out an invitation email from Server Preferences. When the user receives the email he can automatically convert current user into a managed user. However, the feature is suppose to synchronize password between these two users but it didn't for us, so now the user is left with a different password for the local account and OD account. What is going on? Any tips?
This is taken from a book that I am reading:
From a Mac OS X Server email invitation—If your network directory service is being hosted from a local Mac OS X Server that is being managed via Server Preferences, then you can bind it automatically from an email invitation sent by the server’s administrator. Clicking the “Automatically Configure My Mac” button in this email will open the Accounts preferences and bind your Mac to the Mac OS X Server and tie your local account to the server account. Again, this process will synchronize the account passwords and can automatically configure client services. Further, the invi- tation email can have clickable links to other services hosted from the server like file and web services.

Answer 1

I too was thinking about this, but punted after realizing it was too messy. My current solution is to make a local user called 'localadmin' and make this same user on every machine, give it admin privileges, etc. That way, if someone wants to install some software, they can fast-user-switch to localadmin, do the install, and then reset to their actual login. Once the logins are tied to an OD server and you become a 'managed' user, the individual can change their password locally and it will indeed update the OD master.