I've never looked into Live Bookmarks, so I can't speak to that.

As far as keeping all the data on a central server(s), we did that as
a rule at my place of employment.

We'd put everyone's home directories and all the shared data
directories on a central server (which usually shared disk space with
other servers on a SAN (Storage Area Network)), and then ran an nfs
server (software) on the server (the machine) and used the autofs
automount daemon running on all the clients to automatically mount the
home and data directories on any machine that the user sat down at. It
would mount a directory when it was needed, then time out and unmount
it after x minutes of inactivity.

The only real problem we ran into was file locking. It just wasn't too
useful or reliable over NFS and it bit us a few times over the years,
usually when a mail spool was being written to by a mail client and
the mail delivery agent at the same time.

I can probably remember how to set all this up under RedHat or a
clone, but I've never tried it in Ubuntu, I only started using Ubuntu
after leaving work, and I just don't need that sort of setup at home.