Manage clients with multiple workgroups

Question

In our business, everyone belongs to a departamental group, e.g. "Staff Accounts", "Staff Drafting", etc. Each of these groups belongs to a workgroup called "Access Company" that is a managed group that creates non-syncing mobile accounts and manages some other preferences upon login.
There are some additional preferences we'd like to manage for select groups, but not the whole company.
E.g. we wish to have some users use network accounts if they move from desk to desk, but not all users. We've set up a "NetworkUsers" workgroup for this, problem is, for correct access to file server volumes, etc. they also need to belong to "Access Company" group. When they log in, they are prompted which one of the two workgroups they would like to join. We don't exactly want to educate these users to select "NetworkUsers" each time. Is there a way instead to have a certain workgroup take priority over another? Or better, is it possible for different workgroups managed preferences to be combined, which would be even better, that way we don't have to copy all the managed preferences from "Access Company" group over to "NetworkUsers" each time we wish to make change to the managed preferences.
Also, in combination with the "Access Company" workgroup, we wish to manage printers, however, we don't want to add all the same printers to the "Access Company" group because some of our users are at remote sites so don't want irrelevant printers showing up in their list. When we add somebody to a "Print something" workgroup, they will also be part of "Access Company" workgroup. Once again, ideally, we'd like to have the managed preferences combined, if not possible, we can add all the managed preferences from "Access Company" group to "Print something" group and have that single workgroup managing their preferences, but this takes time and when we wish to make a change to managed preference for the whole company, we'll have to update that change in each one of the workgroups in use, so combining managed preferences is definitely desired, otherwise, if really not possible, we could manage with only one workgroup per user, but once again, we're at the problem of them having to belong to the "Access Company" workgroup for file server permission, etc. and we don't want the box to pop up asking them which workgroup they want to join.
Any ideas to get around this problem?
If it's just a limitation of Mac OS X server 10.5, it's a pretty **** big basic lacking feature, and if so, is it better in 10.6 in which case it'll be worth upgrading.

Answer 1

Solved my problem the proper way!!
I read again that combining managed preferences from multiple workgroups is possible on page 6 of this document:
http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/L355774BWkgrpMgrTB.pdf
My tests showed differently, but I eventually figured out why:
Managed preferences will combine only between groups where one is a parent of the other. The child group's managed preferences overrides the parent group's managed preferences, but ONLY IF the parent group is an inherited group from the child group ONLY! (i.e. must be strictly hierarchical)
i.e.
If ChildGroup is a child of ParentGroup and the user is added to ChildGroup only, it will get the combined managed preferences of ChildGroup and ParentGroup.
If the user is explicitly added to both ChildGroup and ParentGroup (instead of ParentGroup being inherited only), the preferences will NOT combine.
If ThirdGroup is also a child of ParentGroup and the user is added to ThirdGroup and ChildGroup, then the preferences also will NOT combine - i.e. the parent group it wants to be combined with must be inherited through one group only. If ParentGroup is inherited from ThirdGroup, but also inherited from ChildGroup, no combining of managed preferences will take place.
My solution was to keep my "Access Company" group only as a non-workgroup for file access and create a new workgroup with company-wide managed preferences to which each departmental group belongs to.
Hope this helps someone who experiences the same problem!