[kyriakos]

> Why are people using more than one machine?

Ever been in a meeting room? Most companies have shared PCs for meeting rooms. Logging in gives you access to your documents so you can hold your meeting and take your notes back to your workstation.

I'm really surprised you worked in a large business and haven't experienced any of this or the need for standardisation. We use a bunch of systems that all work with AD, it's really a solved problem in a Windows based environment.

[Silhouette]

Most companies have shared PCs for meeting rooms.

Are you sure that's not overgeneralising from your own experience? After all, most companies don't even have dedicated meeting rooms, because they aren't big enough. Of the ones that do, I have rarely seen a dedicated PC in there, and that spans the full range of businesses from five guys in a single office through 200+ person medium enterprises right up to some of the largest companies in the world. Most people just take their own laptops, IME. So while I don't doubt that you may have come across this often, it's not necessarily the way everyone else does it.

In any case, basic AAA for organisational user IDs is hardly rocket science, whether you're running on Windows or Linux.

[kyriakos]

The OP mentioned working in one of the largest companies in the world I find it hard to believe they have no conference and meeting rooms. I think you are over-generalizing using startups as a prototype; the enterprise world is a different beast.

[Silhouette]

As I wrote before, I've also worked in some of the largest companies in the world. Obviously those do have meeting rooms in their offices, but IME people typically just bring their own laptops/devices to a meeting. I can't remember the last time I saw a dedicated PC that stayed in a meeting room, other than maybe ones used to run projectors and such in a conference centre that was hired out.