I'm looking for opinions here, and I've love to hear your thoughts and reasons behind them. We have always had a small mac population here, only about 100 macs and 100 ipads. They're bound to AD, which they use for authentication and to point to network drives. They're also all managed by our JSS, which is used 100% for all the management (packages, scripts, settings, printers, etc.)
Now, we're stepping up to an all-mac environment, which will bring in 400 of each device in the next few months, and 1,600 of each in the coming years. We're reevaluating to see if our current setup is best, and how we might make it better.
These machines will be student computers, but owned/managed by the school. So:
1. We are definitely going to be managing them with Casper. We'll use this for VPP software, tracking possesses each machine, etc. Normal stuff.
2. We cannot (convince me I'm wrong, though!) think of a reason to bind them to AD. They'll be logged into using local accounts (students will create their own) so they don't need AD authentication, and they won't have network drives.
3. We're completely unsure if we need to set up Open Directory and Profile Manager. We've never had it set up before, but it sort of looks like Casper can do everything that OD can.
We're working on setting up a 10.9 print server with Papercut on it, so I'm curious if OD is needed for that, or maybe even if AD is needed because of authenticating to print.
If you're willing, just share your thoughts on the best-practice here.