Centralised Enterprise Desktop Management

[cwoollard]

I have been looking at the possibility of replacing Windows on the the enterprise desktop with Linux. Namely Ubuntu 9.10.

It seems easy enough to integrate it with Active Directory for authentication.

There is also Pessulus (http://live.gnome.org/Pessulus) to help lockdown the desktop. This seems all very well for the odd desktop here and there. But what if the number of PCs number in the hundreds or thousands?

Microsoft have group policy, but is there something similar to that in Ubuntu? It would be great if there was some kind of central management tool to configure settings for all the various parts of gnome (Desktop Wallpapers, themes, lockdowns, proxies etc).

Obviously Canonical have a product called Landscape which goes a long way to aid management (i.e. Patches, Scripts, Information Gathering etc). But that product still doesn't allow for centralised settings configuration.

Has anybody else investigated this?

Are there any software products to do this?

Are Canonical working on something?

Does anybody have some advice?

Thanks
Chris

[KlinerDraken]

here are a couple of solutions you can look at.

http://www.likewise.com/products/likewise_enterprise/ubuntu-group-policy.php

http://www.centrify.com/directcontrol/grouppolicy.asp

[cwoollard]

Thanks for the information.

It is useful to know, however I wish there was an open source equivalent system that was actually built into Gnome.

Maybe one day.

Chris