James,
There are a variety of ways to manage this depending on what you want to allow your users to do. Providing the application configuration (NCFG) shortcut to the users in your organization is pretty straight forward and probably easy for everyone to understand from a management perspective.
You could let your users browse and open any map, just take away there ability to save it. You could also put the main map in a folder that your users only have read access to, that way they could not over-write it, but they could save the map to their own computer and make their own variation of the map, or make new maps if they need to.
If you want to make sure they are using the map that you provide, giving them an Application Configuration (NCFG) is a good solution.
Mark