To group or not to group..

[Ididmyc600]

I have a collegue at work who thinks the following.

In a large office area split over several acres, with several floors, there are groups of computers, all the computers are linked onto a LAN, the IP addresses of the computers vary from location to location so that we can tell by IP address which area the PC's are In.

There are no Domain controllers and all computers sit on the same workgroup.

My esteemed collegue believes that the computers would work better if they were put onto their workgroup dependant on their location in the building, that is instead of "workgroup" they would go into the groups such as "groundfloorleft1" or "middlefloorright2".

Is he right or is it a pile of bunkum ?

Regards

 

[momok]

Hi,

I may not be an expert on this, but that seems pretty pointless to me. The performance of each individual computer does not depend on another over a network. Computer users within a workgroup are 'peers' and can automatically share access to their files with each other; thats the point of workgroups.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but creating seperate workgroups would mean 'groundfloorleft' would not be able to have free access to 'middlefloorright'. There would be prompts for username and passwords.

That would pretty much defeat the purpose of creating seperate workgroups to increase work efficiency. Unless of course there was a need for such clear demarcation between floors/departments in the office.


Regards,
Your friendly Momok =)

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi

Yeah I thought as much as well, but I needed to ask, as for rights to share files thats not important at all as each group is a seperate block and dont share files, if that needed doing we as admins have the ability to reach any machine on the network and can copy files that way, apart from which all users log on to the one user profile only with the same username and password which is a locked down account and can only access a front end program which means no desktop shows only the front end application and they use touch screens not keyboards to manipulate the environment.

Regards

 

[Killer_Byte]

Grouping would be a waste of time and energy. Leave them in one Workgroup, they work as they are.

 

[DelJo63]

there are pros/cons for both sides of this argument, and admin access is not
amoung either side.

SHARING (and thus privacy and security) is the issue; the more important this
is to management, the more you lean towards separation of groups.
Allowing everyone to have access to everything is poor systems management.

btw: physical location is usually not a consideration for grouping per se, UNLESS
the locality implies departmental usage. Physicality is usually seen in the network
IP addressing design, where a given building or floor has its own router and therefore
its own subnet.

Grouping by department function is frequently seen. It keeps Sales and Accounting
users, for example, segregated and thus protects (or hides) the data from one being accessed by the other.

The issue of user/passwrd prompts is a good thing and can be solved via admin
one-time access and mapping the appropriate services FOR THIS GROUP or even per USER.