I manage a smallish network that supports a dozen or so employees. We have about 8 TB of data that lives on several NAS devices. I built a 20 TB RAID file server (with a XFS single partition) recently and we are migrating to this.
The current devices are heterogeneous in their permissions: some storage is internal hard drives mounted on Windows 7; some is a Drobo attached by USB to Ubuntu; and a couple others are Snap Servers, which run their own version of UNIX.
Unfortunately, the network workstations are also heterogeneous, as well. We have Linux, Mac OS and Windows XP/Vista/7/8. This has caused a bit of confusion amongst the users in terms of permissions. As a result, I have basically made storage pretty loose, against my better judgement.
With this new system, the array is mounted on a Linux system and all the storage will be on this device. Thus, I have an opportunity to set it up correctly the first time.
This is where my question comes in. What is the best way to do this? Should I create users for everyone (in a group) on network and force them to connect with these credentials? Should I set the permissions to 777 and keep it open? Or is there a better way to accomplish some level of security but also make it easy for my users to have read/write access to the share?
EDIT
From comment, I'd like to update for clarity. I'm sharing with Samba. And the kind of problem I'm seeing is ownership of files and folders.
For example, if I create users (in a group) on the server that correspond to each users' credentials on their workstations, this works OK for permissions, eg, everyone can access and edit files but the ownership is different for files/folders each user created. This causes a problem, since the share should really be writeable by all users, and each user is given the OK to delete folders at their discretion.
What are the aspect of the acls, what you don't like? If you use all of its features (incl. default acls on directories), I can't imagine a situation, which it weren't able to handle. Although even its complexity makes this a little bit hard to learn and automatize. Samba can even convert the windows domain object permissions to acls. Your problem about the file ownerships can be handled by group setgids on the directories. If the directory has a setgid, the newly created files in it will be created with the group of the directory, and not with the group of the creator.
chmod g+s /the/shared/dir