There are two ways that MS Windows machines may interact with each other, with other servers, and with domain controllers: either as standalone systems, more commonly called workgroup members, or as full participants in a security system, more commonly called domain members.

It should be noted that workgroup membership involves no special configuration other than the machine being configured so the network configuration has a commonly used name for its workgroup entry. It is not uncommon for the name WORKGROUP to be used for this. With this mode of configuration, there are no Machine Trust Accounts, and any concept of membership as such is limited to the fact that all machines appear in the network neighborhood to be logically grouped together. Again, just to be clear: workgroup mode does not involve security machine accounts .

Domain member machines have a machine trust account in the domain accounts database. A special procedure must be followed on each machine to effect domain membership. This procedure, which can be done only by the local machine Administrator account, creates the domain machine account (if it does not exist), and then initializes that account. When the client first logs onto the domain, a machine trust account password change will be automatically triggered.