[loxias]

You're probably right, AND, I'm speaking about doing this ~a decade ago. I expect things have improved, but if I recall correctly, the challenge was all the integration with external systems (krb5, LDAP, print stuff). Took more than a month, but was a thing of beauty to have windows and linux desktops, where you type your password _once_, and then everything just works, and you have the same experience regardless of computer. For some reason I remember spending a lot of time on getting the printing to be one click working... shrug

I guess my only point was that samba for just sharing files is already super easy, so I don't get what an "easy way" is for. :) You might be saying "but hard things are easy too", implying that you're more experienced than me at samba and/or the software itself has improved. I wouldn't be surprised if both were true.