Integrating new Apple devices to existing Windows environment

Question

Greetings. Can anyone direct me to a thread or white paper detailing the benefits in adding an OSX server to an existing Windows server environment?
Our company has about 100 windows PCs in a Windows AD environment. We've recently added a few MB Pros, iPhones and iPads. We've already got them working with existing AD accounts and we can map file shares and printers (sort of), but this is slow and seems inefficient.
If this is posted in the wrong category, thanks in advance for directing me to the right one.
-Justin

Answer 1

Hi
If you already have Active Directory that will be providing Kerberos Authentication anyway. OSX Server would not add to what you already have. What you do get is easy access and use of the Wiki and Blog Service as well as Apple's SUS. Open Directory is actually very good and in some circumstances and environments and depending on what you want to achieve better than Active Directory IMO. All of these are easy to setup. You also get Apple's equivalent of Microsoft's WDS - NetBoot. However if you currently only have a few workstations or IOS devices there's no real reason I can think of. For the few workstations you have you can just as effectively manage them locally - assuming you're interested in managing them?
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=13134839#13134839
Kerberos Authentication for Print Servers is fully supported in OSX as long as you configure things correctly:
http://www.cups.org/
If you've installed Print Services for UNIX it should work? Another approach is to simply let the few Macs you have print to desired printers directly.
Tony