Windows Management Software to complement/replace Recon.exe

A scheduled task to periodically run a powershell script (or pipe one from a server) works for me.

Food for thought...

It starts off this way, then future requirements come in requiring more complexity, more custom configuration.

At some point you'll spend more time, effort, money trying to get makeshift solutions working than what it would have cost to setup a simple Windows server.

We have a faculty that has spent so much time setting up Linux and Linux LDAP servers an such to completely manage there mainly Windows clients/domain.

While it does have merit and it's free which is commendable. It also creates a very complex infrastructure, doesn't scale well, and usually involves hacking things to pieces to figure out things that take valued time.

You could go with a product that claims Multiplatform management, however they usually fall short. For example, when SCCM2012 came out. (Translated Casper for Windows) it boasted how it could manage Mac's. After taking a look, I found that it's claim was untrue and was a single drop into the ocean compared to Casper which is 90% of the ocean. It was limited to only being able to deploy pkg's. In this I started thinking about certain pkg's such as Adobe pkg's which can't be store on Windows file shares.

I'm in favour of letting the infrastructure designed for that platform mange it. (Windows manage Windows, Casper manage Mac, Linux mange Linux)

I've been a Windows server admin for most of my career, only in the past 5 years has my scope expanded to include managing Mac with Casper. There are some awesome things on both sides and sometimes I wish Casper could learn something from Microsoft or Microsoft could learn something from JAMF.

My opinion... Small scale do whatever your heart desires with the constraints you have to work with. Large scale, you really need the vendors management infrastructure....