Going from a shared NFS /home to a full LDAP solution

I recently deployed about a dozen Ubuntu (Karmic) desktops in a small office. Everything was going great, but storage became an issue. I then moved /home to an NFS mount which solved the immediate problem.

Months later, I'm regretting this. The company is extremely disorganized with high turnover, people never stay at the same desk for long and now I have 12 machines that anyone needs to access at any given time. This gets crazy with conflicting UID/GID's as well.

I'd like to just use LDAP and make the problem go away. The issue is, they want to be self sufficient, so I need some (easy) way for the office administrator to manage users. Preferably something GUI driven and simple/intuitive to use.

What are my options?

You can try eBox for the server, it has a very straightforward web interface, you can install it from the repositories, and has all the functionality you need. The whole process is documented in the Ubuntu Server Guide, check https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/ebox.html.

However you still would have to take care of the configuration in the client workstations.