Mixed enviroment (Windows & OS X)

I'm in the same boat.

I have a count of 3 PC's and 3 Mac's on a network, along side 4 iPhones, a 5th Gen iPod Touch, and an iPad Mini.

I am leaning twords OS X Server with Open Directory, which can tie into Active Directory on windows clients.

I manage 1200 macs and maybe 30 PCs, with about 200 running Boot Camp. I used to use Active Directory. Overly complex, wasteful. I still use a little Open Directory, but not much. I use Remote Access but only I use it for maintenance and security. In almost 20 years here I long ago discovered that simple is better. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. These pages are rife with examples of how clever people think they are when all they are doing is adding a level of complexity that is unnecessary at best, destroying any productivity at worst.
A good server setup with shared resources is the way to go. Spend your time productive instead of tinkering/fixing/cursing/killing. You can make IT a bottomless pit of despair or a welcome companion.

Les Kern said:

You can make IT a bottomless pit of despair or a welcome companion.

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I love this quote.

kenny01 said:

5. OS X Server/Open Directory

Windows can be added to an Open Directory. However likewise there would be no control over windows stations as OS X Server tools don't support group policy management tools and I'm unaware of third party solution to this.​

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It's my understanding that Win 7 and above can no longer bind into an open directory, be it from Apple or other offerings. It's been a couple of months since I heavily researched it but they dropped support for open directories with Windows 7, forcing directory management to Active Directory. I was (and still am) in a situation where one of our remote offices has a Mac server running 10.7 but 25 of the 27 clients are either Windows XP or Windows 7. Rather than replace the server with a Windows box I've been trying to find a solution that would allow them to manage users from the existing Mac server but have come up dry aside from some hit or miss plugin type solutions on the clients end. I'd love to hear some someone chime in with a simple solution that I could implement without flying out and spending 48 hours onsite to bind the Windows 7 boxes to the Mac server.

With that said, at our main office I manage about 140 Macs (alongside 350 PCs that I don't directly support) that are all bound to both our 2007 Server through Active Directory and our 10.8 server via Open Directory. The setup works reasonably well with the only consistent headache arising when passwords are updated and keychain doesn't update automatically. That is more of a user training issue though and admittedly it's not that frequent any more.