Active Directory Question

[JamesC]

I am fairly new to the Active Directory world, and I have a relatively simple question.

"I" have about 100 windows based machines, all connected to their own private p2p network, based on groups/departments.
For example, 20 stations for team 1, 20 stations for team 2 etc...

My goal is to join them all to an Active Directory server as easily as possible (without interrupting their work).

What is the best way to go about doing this? Is it possible to log in to an active directory server and a seperate domain/workgroup?

If not, should I just have each client login and map a seperate fileshare to their department?

[Any help/suggestions are most appreciated. Thanks!




[Edit]
One more thing. What is the best way (if any) to manage bandwidth using software? Any programs that will map each client on the network and let you allocate or automagically balance bandwidth for them?

 

[Camper]

It will take a restart to get the computers into Active Directory but once their in there you can use group polices or use some sort of log on script to map drives.
What you can do for each department is create an Organization Unit or (OU) for each department where you can have different polices for different departments.

If I where you I would do some research on plaining an Active directory domain. Here is some information.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...rectory/activedirectory/stepbystep/admng.mspx
http://www.visualwin.com/AD-XP/
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/technologies/featured/gp/default.mspx

 

[JamesC]

Thanks a lot. The OU way sounds very useful.

As for setting up AD, I will leave the server/DNS stuff up to the sysadmin, since I am just contracted to work on this, I am not positive how he has this place set up. I will tell him what you told me though. Thanks again.