Windows Domain laptops working offline

Question

We have several laptops and many more users. On a field job there will be one person with a laptop set up to his domain account. The other people will have to use that laptop if they require access to a computer.

Since the computer is offline there is no way to authenticate the users password. (But since this information is cached when (one) user logs in while online, there must be a way to force this for 100 users too. That would be a smooth solution!)

How would you solve this scenario? We are talking of 100 users and about 35 laptops.

Answer 1

In my experience you can login in to your computer which has been registered to a particular domain even when you are not connected. The catch being that you have signed in at least once while you were connected to the domain servers. This has worked many times while the networks were down (servers could not be found) at my workplace. This is possible because the user accounts are created on the local machine once they register themselves to AD. This may just be a work-around and not a permanent solution.

Another way is that you can login to the local account of the computer by first typing the computer name/administrator account name.

Answer 2

I believe you can make the users local admins and they will be able to login with their AD accounts while off-line.