What benefits are there to joining a Windows domain?

Question

My company has one mac user with a Macbook Air, we have a Windows 2008 r2 domain.
I'm wondering if it is worth joining him to the domain, what benefits are there for a mac user?
We use Exchange 2007 and change our passwords every 90 days.
One concern is when the user is out of the office the cached password can become out of sync with the domain passowrd.
This is an anoyance and can be confusing.
Any advice would be much appriciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Greetings.
I am a 1 of 2 Mac users in a company that otherwise is using Windoz. I do not join the domain though, because I really see no reason to. I can get to the printers, to the web, to the Exchange and to the SharePoint. Though mostly I need SVN and cloud services anyway.
Thus no real reason. Unless there is some specific stuff that is setup on the network that is only available to windows machines authenticated with a certificate and joined to the windows domain, like for instance a split tunnel VPN or something along those lines, there is really no need to be "on the domain" connected to the LAN works just fine if not better.
HOWEVER
There is that annoying bit about the passwords.
Some sysadmins like to setup password expiration, thus forcing us mortals to rotate three (almost identical) passwords every three months. In this case you just need to setup a reminder on your calendar that prompts you a week in advance to change your password.
How to change your password? You have options:
OPTION 1
Now. If your Mac has OS pre Lion (no higher then 10.6) then you have old samba installed by default and that comes with "smbpasswd" command. To change the password just open the mighty mac terminal and type:
smbpasswd -r YOUR_WINDOWS_DOMAIN_CONTROLLER_IP -U username
Then the output will be something like this:
Old SMB password: ********
New SMB password: *********
Retype new SMB password: *********
Password changed for user username
Of cause replace the YOUR_WINDOWS_DOMAIN_CONTROLLER_IP with the IP of your domain controller. Do not know your domain controller IP? run Google "net lookup master" command. I think older macs have it. (not sure)
if you are running Lion, you do not have smbpasswd command. I think Apple either wrote their implimentation of samba or just use some stripped down wersion of it, not sure. It has to do with some dreary and borring licensing thing.
You can either install samba yourself form sources... Thus if you are brave and adventurous here is a walk through http://forums.sonos.com/showthread.php?t=24022 or you can use optopn two:
OPTION 2
If your company has not gone to the cloud hosting and still use the old-school home grown Exchange hosted in the broom closet, you might have a web version of the M$ Exchange running. The URLs usually something like: https://owa.yourcompanyname.com. If you have that then the sysadmins may have the password change feature enabled there. Login to your web interface for Outlook (OWA), In the top right corner choose the "Change Password" feature and use it.
If this is not an option because either your sysadmin is not running OWA or the password change feature is not enabled you have still have options.
OPTION 3:
If you are working for a company that loves Windows and their products you might have an M$ Office installed on your Mac. Thus you might have Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) utility. If not you can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/mac/remote-desktop-client. Then remote desktop to a machine in your office and you will get to it's login screen where you can change the windows domain password. (This requires a machine to which you can remote desktop)
OPTION 4:
Walk up to any Windowz box that no one is using, CTRL + ALT + DEL one time and this will give you the login screen, you can change password form there.
OPTION 5:
Ask your sysadmin to setup your password to never expire, or add the policy for your user so that you can change it in OWA (see option 2)