There’s a variety of management solutions that can help with managing Mac systems. Apple’s recommendations for Mac management are outlined in their series of whitepapers and seminars.

1. Apple’s Best Practices for Mac OS X Client Management Seminar is free and available online. It does an excellent job at summarizing your options for system management.
2. An extended transcript from the online seminar is available as a PDF file: Best Practices for Managing Mac Systems
3. Whitepapers:
   • Solutions for Systems Management
   • The Mac and Minimal-Touch Deployment Best Practices
   • System Imaging & Software Update Administration
   • Local Management Policy on the Mac

In one of Apple’s documents, it briefly references KACE. Dell offers the KACE appliances or virtual machines as all in one management solutions for PCs, Dells, Macs. More at the KACE website. Given our current relationship with Dell, this may be a small investment with large benefits.

Other solutions for managing Macs (some mentioned in Apple’s whitepapers and others not) include:

• Altiris – multiplatform.
• Casper – ?
• BigFix – multiplatform.
• Puppet – multiplatform.
• cfengine
• DeployStudio – multiplatform?.
• LANDesk – multiplatform.
• Open Directory with Workgroup Manager, ARD – not multiplatform.
• Munki – http://code.google.com/p/munki/w/list (specifically for pushing OS updates and software packages)
• Extending existing Active Directory Schema.