Hello,
How would you setup and connect 4 sites with a combined user composition of 70% Mac OS and 30% Windows 10/11 OS. Asking in terms of centralized management; user profiles and documents/data, shares with ACLs, backup.
Active Directory is mostly what our client use and I know you can join Apple devices to it, but I don’t think we have anyone doing it.
I can’t help much on the windows side, but the Mac way of doing things requires an MDM be set up for managing profiles (and you’ll want an Apple Business account if you want to do no-touch deployments). Jamf is the big name in the game, but there are others (I use Mosyle at work). Some people have tried InTune to do both Mac and Windows, but I’ve heard nothing but tales of woe about its Mac support.
There’s a very active MacAdmins slack channel and an annual conference at Penn State which posts all its videos on YouTube, lots of good info in those two places.
People advised for years not to bind Macs to AD, but I’m not sure what the state of that advice is. We use an open source product called Nomad Login AD that syncs local account passwords with AD but it was scooped up by Jamf a couple years ago and the project has gone somewhat dormant.