I’ve looked - not very detailed where I was. What about diverting the user’s local files to a network share, invisibly? Distributed/replicated file shares across the various offices, automatically?
This is UNIX, it was invented with things like that in mind. If you use X11 you don't even know where a program is being run from. Netboot will even make your client effectively a diskless terminal if you want to be able to centrally manage all your images on the server instead of pushing them out.