Chromebooks + Windows Domain

[Patrick]

Afternoon,

 

I'm wondering if any of you guys can give me a quick run down on whats possible with chromebooks as i'm very much in the dark with them. Our current setup is a windows domain with ageing laptops that need replacing and the price of chromebooks is very tempting. Students in KS1 log in with a shared logon and save to a network share, KS2 log in using individual accounts and are using a mandatory profile. All domain accounts have my documents and the desktop being redirected.

 

How much of this current set up is achievable on chromebooks? Is it possible to login using their current AD credentials? Adding the network printers? What about saving work? Ideally we'd like to save back to the server, as we will have a mix of windows PC's and Chromebooks, so saving to the same location would be ideal. I'd love to hear how some of you guys have them set up, any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

Edited October 30, 2018 by Patrick

[Scrambles]

We have Office 365 and Google tenant's and have around 70 chromebooks in our high school.

The way we don't it is that we have Azure Active Directory sync with our Google Directory so each user's email address is the same on both.

The Chromebooks are enrolled onto our google tenant

We also have on site ADFS so our google login page is redirected to adfs.

 

Students logon with their school email address and password.

The Chromebook is set so it will only allow login's from our domain (Stops logging in with personal email) and the upside of this is that it will automatically log them into Office Online as well.

At the moment if students want to continue work from the windows domain on a Chromebook they will first save their work into their OneDrive. We are also looking at enabling the HTML5 client for our RDS Gateway so they will be able to run a windows desktop from their Chromebook via remote session. However, the majority of work our students do on Chromebooks is online research and using webapps

Edited October 30, 2018 by Scrambles

[mrbios]

I've basically set ours up in the exact same way as @Scrambles above. Had lots of problems getting them to work properly with ADFS though which were all resolved after switching to passthrough authentication, which i would recommend if you don't need ADFS for anything else.

 

Just wish there was a way of connecting their home folders to them now...

[Patrick]

So it's not impossible to get them to login using AD credentials but mapped drives/home folders isn't possible right now? Thanks for your input!

[mrbios]

So it's not impossible to get them to login using AD credentials but mapped drives/home folders isn't possible right now? Thanks for your input!

 

Well, i briefly played around with this: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7497916?hl=en

 

That allows you to setup a chrome enterprise domain, you then control chromebooks with group policy rather than the gsuite policies, and add the chromebooks to the domain. Unfortunately my trial ran out before i got to far, but it seemed a bit clunky (albeit i was rushing and maybe skipping steps in an attempt to just barely understand it all) I'm not quite sure of how much more beneficial that round would be in comparison to gsuite managed devices. Certainly worth giving it a go though.

 

I might have another stab at it soon, i've got one chromebook to play around with. I don't know what the difference is in terms of licensing costs this route either.

[Primus]

So it's not impossible to get them to login using AD credentials but mapped drives/home folders isn't possible right now? Thanks for your input!

 

You need to get your mapped drive content into the cloud - whether it's G Suite or O365 - then Chromebooks will fit what you're looking for. Otherwise they're never going to support mapped local drives like Windows does. Sure there's limited SMB support etc now but it's not going to do what you want unless your content is in the cloud.

[PrimaryNetMan]

It sounds like you are in a Primary environment. If you do go the Chromebook route for pupil devices then look at going completely G Suite for the children accounts long term. Will save you time, money and sanity in the long run. Have just removed the last pupil device from our Domain, only admin and staff laptops remain. Thanks to Chromebooks + G Suite have managed to increase pupil devices by 50% while saving 50% on equivalent Windows machine costs.

[Patrick]

Thanks for the input and advice. I'll take some time and figure out whats best for the individual school.