I wasn't sure if this question would have been better suited for the Lion forum, but figured there's probably better expertise in this forum for this question. I recently got a new MacBook Air for work. It's going to be about a week before my network admin will be able to get to my office (he's remote) to join my MBA to the corporate Active Directory Domain. He asked me not to really do anything with my MBA until he can get me connected to the domain. He said to not install anything or do any customizations to it. My question is why? He admitted that he really doesn't know a lot about Macs, so I'm wondering if he's just being overly cautious because he just doesn't know any better or if there's really a valid reason why I shouldn't start setting things up in terms of installing Office 2011, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, Firefox, etc before he can join me to the Active Directory domain?
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Joining to the corporate/work domain
- Thread starter lnferno
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So I'm guessing you're logged onto your Mac now using the account you setup when you first started your Mac.
If he has you start using an Active Directory account, that's a separate account from the account you're using now.
If you spend a lot of time getting your settings and preferences perfect for the account you're using now, and then have to switch to a totally different account, that might be a lot of work for nothing.
If he has you start using an Active Directory account, that's a separate account from the account you're using now.
If you spend a lot of time getting your settings and preferences perfect for the account you're using now, and then have to switch to a totally different account, that might be a lot of work for nothing.
I asked him about that -- he said the only thing to be sure is to NOT name my Mac username the same as my AD logonID. I don't believe that he's going to be creating a new profile/user. Playing devil's advocate, even if I did do that, are installed apps user specific?
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My guess is that once he joins your Mac to AD, he's going to have you start logging onto your Mac using your normal AD account. That way when you try to connect to AD resources (like file shares, Exchange, etc) you'll already be authenticated.
I don't use that many third-party apps, but I haven't run into any that were user specific (in that they would only run for one user). App preferences are user specific, though. So logged on your Mac with your local account, if you get your Firefox bookmarks perfect, when you logon with your AD account the first time, Firefox there won't have any bookmarks. You'll have to export them from one account and import them on the other. Same with other app preferences. That may not be a big deal for you. Some of the Mac designers I work with would kill me if they lost their Adobe preferences. lol
