There are quite a few commercial systems management products out there for Windows. As with any product space, each has its strengths and weaknesses. Altiris, for example, offers incredible power. LanDesk may lack some of that power, but is far easier to use. As far as I know, there's no comparable systems management suite consisting of primarily open source software. I'm considering changing that situation.
In the past couple of years, I've begun learning a lot of new things about scripting for systems administration, deploying patches, repackaging and deploying software, and generally maintaining the health of systems on a network. I've shared bits of that knowledge here, as I've had the time and desire to write them up. But I've never taken things to the "next level" and actually converted that knowledge into a usable tool set.
For example, I have a DOS batch script which will deploy a specific Microsoft patch to a specific computer from the command line. I have another script which can simultaneously execute a command on multiple systems. Another set of scripts will run a CHKDSK on a remote system, examine the output, determine if any "significant" errors exist, instruct the system to repair errors on the next reboot, and reboot the system. Other scripts can check for impending disk failure, low disk space conditions, etc. Taken as a whole, these scripts would be useful for a small shop (say, 1000 PCs or less) to manage their systems. Extended a bit, they could probably handle a larger network of machines.
Because I'm starting to get the "itch" to create something, I'm toying with the idea of developing my own equivalent of an Altiris or LanDesk that's built using free or freely-available software. That way, the small organization with 20-150 PCs can manage their system like the bigger shops. And the bigger shops who may not have the money for one of the commercial products can still reap the benefits of automated systems management, without the expense.
This is still just the germ of an idea in my head. My existing scripts are too site specific and undocumented to be widely used without a lot of tweaking. And heck, I may not even have the programming and scripting skill needed to pull off some of the things I would consider critical to such a tool. (For example, minimizing network bandwidth usage by transmitting a software package to one machine on a subnet, then transmitting the package from that machine to others on the same subnet might be more than I know how to accomplish.)
Still, it's fun to think about...

