Cahced credentials for laptops

[guitarzan]

Looking for some general advice.

We have an SBS 2008 network. remote users use RWW to connect to a Terminal Server, or in some cases their local workstation (to run apps that can't run on Terminal Server). They remote in from home, or in some cases remote in from customer's computers via RWW and IE.

I will be setting up several laptops, whose purpose will be to distribute to our staff, so they can bring to customer sites and, using the customer's internet connection, log onto our servers via RWW. Technically, these laptops don't ever need to log onto the domain directly. BUT, there will be many staff members who will need to use these laptops, on a rotating basis. I don't want to create a separate local account for each user... If I join the laptops to the domain, they can use cached credentials to log on to the laptops using their domain username and password.

But are there limitations to this? Do the laptops need to actually log onto the domain after a certain period of time? Is there a better way to achieve what I want?

 

[gmannatl]

Honestly, the choice is yours on this. If you join the laptops and they login once they can use the cached credentials when they are not able to connect to the domain. There is no requirement for them to login other than if they do login while in the office password policy, GPO, etc. changes would occur.

If they are company machines personally I would join them to enforce some level of security. Otherwise if the users are savvy and need more control and/or more simple control of their own laptops you may opt to just leave them disconnected from the domain.