producer laptops - new setup for us

[Lynne Desrochers]

We may be behind the times here but we are looking at giving our producers laptops instead of desktops and letting them take them home and out on the road. Also, for when they are here in the office, we are thinking of setting up some docking stations (or port replicators) so they could sit wherever there is an empty cubicle.
Anyone out there doing this? Is there a newer idea?  Also, if I have 5 possible cubes for them to sit in, does it work best if all 5 have the same exact equipment, meaning make/model, for dual monitors, scanners, possible printer?

Thank you in advance for any recommendations.
Lynne

[Jeff Zylstra]

We may be behind the times here but we are looking at giving our producers laptops instead of desktops and letting them take them home and out on the road. Also, for when they are here in the office, we are thinking of setting up some docking stations (or port replicators) so they could sit wherever there is an empty cubicle.
Anyone out there doing this? Is there a newer idea?  Also, if I have 5 possible cubes for them to sit in, does it work best if all 5 have the same exact equipment, meaning make/model, for dual monitors, scanners, possible printer?

Thank you in advance for any recommendations.
Lynne

If you're going to use docking stations, you pretty much have to have identical or at least compatible hardware.  And I would recommend them, especially if you want dual monitors. 

Other considerations would be managing these things for Windows and other ancillary updates, anti-virus and its updates, etc...   You will probably need to ENFORCE updates and scanning, since producers will want to escape out of anything that takes time.   They're too important er, impatient for that.      You can probably do this at login or logout via a script.  If you don't know how, just ask here. It's really pretty easy, and once you get it setup it should be automatic.

You might want to set up a separate group policy for laptops.  Someone who has a lot of them would be a better judge of that.  A VPN for remote access I would say is also a must but then again, I will defer to the dedicated professionals who are probably even more paranoid than I am.   

I'm kind of interested to see what others will recommend.