Deploying or Cloning OS

Question

Fairly new to the deployment world as far as Mac OS goes. We have bought 15 copies of Mountain Lion for deployment to a small division within the company.
Hardware background: Select few have MacBook Pro Retinas, otherwise MacBook Pro 6,2 mostly with some as old as MacBook Pro 5,3. All have at least 4GB of RAM and will be getting SSD's.
Software background: computers are currently on 10.6.8 mostly, some on 10.5.8. All need to be moved up to 10.8. Clean image is the preferred method instead of upgrading over the top of existing OS. Office will also be upgraded to 2011 and Adobe Creative Suite will be moving to CS6. Hardware
Question is whether or not I can simply build a "master" image with all the Finder settings I want for all (Sharing/Energy Saving prefs etc), freeware (browsers, FTP) and licensed software (Office) then simply use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone it to the other machines.  I know there is DeployStudio, JAMF and likely other suites but we're looking for a very simple and quick solution here as we have limited Mac knowledge or resources to dedicate to researching how to get those suites going.
Does cloning a mac to another lead to any strange behaviors once the clones are up and running?  Can the master and the clone be on the same network without problems?
Hanging on to or setting up recovery partitions at the same time as the cloning process would be a nice bonus also.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Cloning a Mac to another Mac doesn't really lead to any issues, with a couple exceptions:
1)  All the machines will have the same computer name or host name.
2)  If you bind a machine to Active Directory before "cloning" it, then all machines will be bound to AD with the SAME computer name in AD.  If you unbind one of the machines, ALL of them will be unbound in a single swoop.  Not good ;-)
So this "cloning" is a farily common technique used when people want to do a "quick and dirty" system to make a bunch of machines look and act the same.
That said, building packages that can be installed with a tool like JAMF on top of the "stock" OS X configuration is a better route to go, though it takes longer to set up.  Also, note that this "cloning" approach WILL break should you ever get new machines.  It is not possible to deploy an image on hardware that's newer than the image, so there are times along the way that new machines come out and you'll need to create an entirely new image on the new hardware, hence the reason the "package-based" approach works better down the road: It assumes you're starting with Apple's installer and then installing packages which lay down configuration settings or applications on top of it.
FWIW AFP548.com is probably the best site with any sorts of details you'd need here.