Need suggestions for office setup

Question

My company has moved completely to Macs for our client machines. We have roughly 30 employees and all have either MacBook Pros, or MacBook Airs, so all laptops.  We have legacy PC servers, many of which can go away and a couple that are running software we need that can be P2V'd.
I'd like to get us off of Active Directory and moved over to a Mac server. I have a Mac Pro running 10.8 server, and I'm familiar with setting up, configuring and administrating OS X Server.
My question is about how I should structure our setup.  Things to consider are as follows:
We are an advertising agency, quite a bit of data, about a terabyte in our main share
We currently backup to tape
Users use their laptops for personal things as well, this means iTunes libraries on laptops (I know, but we're a pretty lax / cool company)
We are doing in-house video work. Our video guy needs to keep the raw footage archived indefinitely. This has led to 6 terabytes in 6 months, and will not be stopping.
We host our email with Google Business Apps
Currently users have a local account and password on computer, Active Directory user / pass for shares, Google user / pass for email
We can currently have 4 x 3 TB hard drives in the Mac Pro and we have a 16 TB Drobo
What I would LIKE to do:
Move all data to OS X Server
Backup data to external drive that gets swapped weekly and stored offsite
Allow users to use their laptops for personal / iTunes things, but protect important data on laptop.  Ideally I'd liket to either setup home sync on server an only sync the Documents folder or something similar, or do Time Machine backups to server from each laptop but exclude lots of folders. I'd like to be able to keep important data on server, not locally on laptops, but not be responsible for their music etc., but not be a jerk and bring down the heavy.
I would like to have a separate solution for handling the video raw footage data, outside of day to day office data
I would like to consolidate as much user / pass info as possible, even if that means I can only consolidate the local user with a network account.  What would be the best way to migrate local laptop users to network accounts?
ANY suggestions will be greatly appreciated.  How would you go about setting this up?  It would be easy if I were starting from scratch, but I'm not. I need to implement the new way while preserving data from how things are setup now.
THANKS THANKS THANKS!!!

Answer 1

I can certainyl see why you don't want to copy that amount of data. In that case you need to do the following.
Make sure an account for the user exists in Open Directory. This could be with the same or a different shortname.
You can set mobile accounts to be created (for laptops) and you can configure options to either sync or not to sync the users home directory. If they are as big as you say you want not to sync the contents.
On the laptop make sure you have a separate local admin account, not the users current account.
On the laptop log in as the admin
On the laptop run Terminal
On the laptop cd /Users
On the laptop mv (move) the existing home folder for the user to a new temporary name
On the laptop open System Preferences
On the laptop click on Accounts
On the laptop delete the users current account
On the laptop click on Login Options
On the laptop join the laptop to your Open Directory system (assuming it is correctly configured and running)
On the laptop reboot (just to be safe)
On the laptop login as the users new network login, assuming you have configured things on the server appropriately you will get asked if you want to create a mobile account.
On the laptop once it has created the account it will finish logging in to an empty account. Now log out.
On the laptop log in as the admin account again.
On the laptop run Terminal
On the laptop mv (move/rename) the old home directory to the correct name for the account
On the laptop do sudo chown -R usersnewshortname usersnewshortname. This makes sure the new account owns all the old files.
All the above will move the users home directory from the old standlone account to a network account.