Application restriction policies compared to Win 2003?

[Helder Dias]

We are on the process of evaluating a new and decent server for our video/graphics enterprise, with less than 30 employees. The administrative, financial and commercial people work on cheap intel boxes running Win XP and the 4-5 creatives work on one IBM Pentium III Xeon station running Win 2000 and Combustion and my jewel, a PM G5 running OS 10.3 with the usual Adobe and Macromedia apps, all tied together with Win 2000 server on an anecdotical Pentium III desktop which, of course, can’t even deal with Active Directory.

My dream candidate would be an Xserve to run all the File Serving, Web serving and QuickTime streaming. I think that OS X Server 10.3 can handle all this without problem to all the Windows boxes except for a doubt I couldn’t see answered through my internet searches : can it handle the restriction policies on applications that an Intel server running Windows 2003 Small Business Server Active Directory can apply on the Windows clients?

Managing restrictions on File and Printing services on the Xserve I think isn’t a problem but trying to enforce restrictions on client application functions and features that those dumb users keep changing and then ask for our help for fixing day after day all the hour, including simple things like altering the layout of Word or the screensaver is a lot more difficult and can probably be only enforced with a Windows server.

Can this be handled by OS X Server alone or just with the help of a third party application or is only possible with a Windows server?
Could it be solved by running the Active Directory services on a cheap Xeon server and the other services on the Xserve?
With this last configuration the Xserve would remain as the Primary Domain Controller for the Windows clients?
Can it be achieved only by Terminal commands?

I also posted this question on Apple Mac OS X 10.3 Server Usage discussions.

Thanks for any help.

[Helder Dias]

Thanks for the answer.

Through my searches made after the post and conversations held with an Apple Server technician I concluded that the best solution to my scenario is to create Groups and Users and respective policies in Active Directory on Windows 2000 or 2003 Server and then replicate them to OS X Server’s Open Directory.

Of course this is a tortuous method and one of the downsides is that any change on user policias has to be made again on the windows server and then replicated to Xserve.

So I think you’re absolutelly right on what you say. Do you have any further recomendations?

Thanks again for the help.

[Author]

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