Just learned last week that macOS Sierra will no longer support mobile accounts and Apple Filing Protocol (AFP); both will be “deprecated” in the release of macOS 10.12. While I was aware that AFP was on the endangered list and had already started to switch all computers in my labs to SMB, the potential loss of mobile accounts is painful.
If you’re not familiar with mobile accounts, these are special local accounts that one can create on a particular computer for a network user in an Open Directory controlled domain. This means that OD network users can have local account-level user experience when logging into their assigned computer. This is essential if they need to access an Exchange account using Outlook for Mac 2016 as it does not support caching messages on a network drive. This means that Outlook for Mac 2016 MUST save email messages on the local directory of the computer.
For me, this means that any new computer shipped with macOS Sierra 10.12 will need to be bound to the Active Directory domain for authentication and a home directory forced upon login. This will be fine for the majority of our users, but on computers shared by several students or systems that are used for video editing and production, this is a non starter.
More on this in the future.