Referencing Windows server names and access to their shares...

Hi all,

maybe just silly questions, we are migrating from one DNS internal domain to a new one.

Old domain is myverynicecompany.be and the new one is myverynicecompany.group

1) is it a bad habit to access shares via \\server\ instead of the full domain name \\server.myverynicecompany.group\ ?

2) PCs when connected on the LAN receive the search domain suffix of myverynicecompany.be whereas when connected through the VPN they get myverynicecompany.group suffix domain. So users that programme and use Windows shares (for instance in Excel sheets) complain that through the VPN their Excel sheets don't work.
What to do?

To add a second domain search suffix (I always though would be good to have only one) or to force sers to access Windows resource through the full path \\server.myverynicecompany.group\ ?

Technically I can add CNAMEs entries for the domain myverynicecompany.group that point to myverynicecompany.be but this means I have to duplicate all the entries from the myverynicecompany.group to myverynicecompany.be and if by accidents there are 2 servers with the same name on both the domains this doesn't apply.

What are the best practices and or solutions to the habit of \\<server>\ usage?

Sorry for the silly questions but I come from the Unix world and I always imposed the usage of the full path. Maybe in Windows there are tricks/solutions, that I'm not aware of, that can be done/implemented.

Thanks for sharing your comments and/or links that can explain this topic :-)

Alex