Summary
The company I work for recently implemented a centralised IT management policy. For this we need a set of tools to manage our 50+ NT Servers and 1300+ (Various MS OS's) Desktop PC's at 16 sites across the UK.
We looked at a range of commercial software, but found no available package that was suitable, due either to the cost or to the lack of features. Then we looked at open source tools and very quickly found the tools we needed. Our system now has 3 Linux servers with a range of open source tools installed, including a system monitoring tool and a multiuser help desk.
I will talk about the tools we chose and how we use them. I will also talk briefly about some of the other tools we looked at and about some of the improvements we plan for the future.
This is a real (mostly) Linux success story in a previously pure MS environment. The ease of use and flexibility of Linux and open source tools allowed us to achieve our goals faster and at a considerably reduced cost when compared to similar commercial offerings.