AwkwardUnicorn

We run a college with around 3000 Apple computers (iMacs, macbooks, etc etc) and a few windows. We have 2 apple servers, 1 is a cache box the other a Casper disribution point. The rest is windows / Linux. The Mac's are so easy to manage compared to when we were a windows enviroment. Honestly it leaves our department to focus on improvemts rather than constantly fixing nonsense issues. Our users are NOT domain bound as they own their own computers, however with the power of Casper we still have all the functionality (is we needed it) as if they were. If you go full mac get a decent management software such as Casper. There really is no subsitute.

Hey Geekette, I've replied to your PM It is quite early here though and I've not have coffee yet so take it with a grain of salt!

TL;DR - You don't need to have a Mac server to have Macs in your environment. Everything can be done by Windows Servers. The only Mac server we have now is a Mac Mini running as a cache server (highly recommended!). We run an (almost) entirely Mac based environment. All students use Macbooks and iPads and all staff have a choice between Mac OS or Windows. Way back when, we used to manage all our accounts on Mac's by using Active directory. As said above the only thing you need to do is set the time server to your domain controller (we did this via managed preference so it could not be changed by users)... This way works, and was great paired with a simple mac management system for deploying applications and such. When a new computer arrive at IT we would image it (I think we used Deploy studio) and then bind to the domain and job's done. X serve was allowing macs access to the file shares. Now that we are a lot more experienced with Mac OS (and the fact the students now own their own devices) we've moved away from the domain controllers and instead to a management suite (can we name drop on these forums?). Now literally everything is automated, from a new computer enrollments, to software installations, to remote recovery, software repairs and (though we don't like it) even imaging. We moved to Windows shares years ago and never looked back. We have a very hands off approach towards Computer deployment and management. Not sure if any of this answers your question as I found your post a little difficult to read, however hopefully this post has some helpful information!

Nice thread idea. Here's our usage....fairly similar to yours but in a longer time.

We have exactly 56 here at the college, with roughly 30 in use each period, all on the same VLAN and SSID. We've had a few ups and downs but nothing that has not been fixed by the ATV software updates or rebooting the ATV itself or in extreme cases restarting the gateway... With the latest software version you don't even need to be on a network to airplay! This could (depending on how it pans out) really save all of our networks.

Thats great! Thanks!

Heres a bootable version tutorial. I hate the automatic upgrades! How to Perform a Clean Install of OS X Mavericks

Hey there, We use heaps of Smartboard's in our college. Heres a few things I try. First, try another pen tray - most series have removable trays, if you have another 660 swap the trays and see if the fault persists. Next, try another USB cable. Next try the latest version drivers - I think they are up to 11.3 now? updating drivers have fixed issues more time then I can count. You can also try the diagnostics tool - under the SB control panel. Here you can read what the board is doing in real time, google has heaps of information on reading the code if it doesn't make sense to you. I've found with the 600 series when the front layer starts to come away from the membrane then problems occur. I've pretty much give up with them when this happens.