Scripting Windows

Windows is imminently scriptable, but getting started is not as discoverable as most *nix OSs. To get information out of your Windows boxes, the best tool available is it's CIM provider, WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation).

WMI itself is not very good at being discoverable, but the Microsoft Scripting Guys created a fantastic tool called Scriptomatic2 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/dd939957.aspx) allows you to browse various Windows namespaces and all of their component classes, and displays sample code for displaying this information in your choice of VBScript, JScript, Perl, or Python.

Combine the information accessible via WMI with well-targeted LDAP / Active Directory searches, and you can gather almost any information from your Windows Infrastructure that you could imagine.