Losing the directory

I was listening the the most excellent Out of School podcast by Fraser Speirs and Bradley Chambers and was struck by a comment Chambers made about how they had gotten rid of their Active Directory in their school. Now this obviously doesn’t affect iPads, as they don’t need logging in etc, but what was interesting is how they just had local accounts for their Macs. Here’s why I’m interested…

• One of the annoying parts of using the Macs at the moment is waiting for network accounts to be available when you first turn them on, and then waiting for login to happen. This wouldn’t be a problem any more!
• Another annoying thing is the issues Macs seem to have if you leave a network account logged in for long periods of time. I leave my personal MacBook on all the time and it just wakes up fine, no problem. But network accounts seem to be a lot more unstable, so much so that I encourage teachers to turn off, or at least log off, their Mac at the end of every day.
• Now obviously one would still like the benefits of being able to manage the preferences on a Mac, even if one wasn’t using a directory. Now my understanding of Profile Manager is that it pushes preferences directly to a Mac without the need for a directory as such. Interesting and interestinger!