If this is too much of an Apple question please feel free to move it.
Im having some trouble with mac networking in a Windows environment. We give all of our computers short names like PC001 that then of course automatically gets the rest of our domain added to it to make a FQDN like PC001.net.domain.com but that's really a reachable address from across the web. From a Windows computer I can ping PC001 by just pinging PC001 without the rest of the name because of DNS. I can also map a a shared drive from PC001 using \\PC001\share. But my problem is that using our Macs I cannot ping PC001 or map a share from it. Trying to ping PC001 just returns unknown host. Same with trying to map a smb:// share. I know OSX relies heavily on Bonjour to handle things like this, but we have multiple buildings which each have their own subnet which breaks bonjour. The macs can see other macs in their building but not in other buildings.
All of these computers are using DHCP and I have the DNS and WINS servers configured the same for both. My question is why can I ping PC001 from a windows box no problem but the mac cant seem to find it. I thought macs worked fine with TCP/IP and DNS but I guess I'm learning that's not quite the case. BTW all the Macs are either 10.5 or 10.6