Setman

Setman consists of two parts.

• An easily extendable xml-based format for defining 'settings'
• A command line utility to import, export, compare and validate settings files.

Who needs it?

The intended audience is system administrators who need a tool for implementing settings on multiple workstations in a documented, automated and robust fashion.

Systems administrators can:

• Define a default set of settings for workstations and apply them as part of unattended setups.
• Import settings to the Default User profile to have them in place for all users on the workstations.
• Define and administer 3rd party application specific settings.
• Have all the above in one place and thus eliminate the need for a large collection of different scripts.

To my knowledge no other solution exists. Microsoft's Group Policy and Local Security Policy are all fine and well, but they were designed for enforcing settings – not managing them in general. And they're a bit of a hazzle to customize and extend. And without an Active Directory installation in place, they're not really an option.

Suppose you just want to give users a nicely preconfigured desktop. Or maybe you'd like to move your setting to a new pc. And you want to define these settings once and for all - but still be able to find out exactly how you did it and be able to change them.

Update Nov-12 2003:

The project is now in alpha and a release can be downloaded here.

The documentation is available here and is included in the release.

A brief description of the design is here.

Morten Odgaard modg@users.sourceforge.net

Setman project page on Sourceforge
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