My organization currently uses Novell for authentication, etc. Our AD is setup as an application domain only. We are, in the "near" future, going to be migrating to a full AD implementation, but as of right now, most of our desktops are not members of our AD domain. My question: How can I discover these machines, and manage them? I would like the full boat of capabilities; inventory, software/update deployments, etc. I do have a few machines in the AD domain, but I need to know how to, if it's possible, use different credentials for the non-AD boxes in order to push the clients, etc.

Network discovery might be your only options. But you could also try a startup script within Novell to discover and push out the client to those PCs. Yes you can define other accounts to use to install the client. Look at the Accounts tab under the Client push installation properties. http://www.enhansoft.com/

If I can't reference local accounts, then is it even possible to manage a computer that is not part of AD? As in my original post, I have tons of desktops that are Novell clients, and not in my AD.

Ok, so I can put multiple accounts under that tab. So it would try the first account, fail on that, then automatically and immediately go to the second account? Could you specify to use a local account, without including machinename\account?

Yes it will try them in order sorta.. It tries the "best-shot" account first I think. This is the one that works most often. No, you can't use local accounts. John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum |

Yes it is possible but most people manually install the Client for the FEW WS not in AD. In your case, I would seriously consider looking at a Startup script to install the client on these PCs. http://www.enhansoft.com/

Gotcha. I read that in your first response, but didn't really get it. Just need to take that CCMSetup.exe, wrap it up in a script, calling the parameters I want and run it on startup... sorry, sometimes it takes a 2x4 to get through to me, lol.

lol.. I understand that! I happens to me too.. Remember that I said "Startup Script" and not “Logon Script”. The CCMSetup must be run as an Administrator and a startup script will run as Local System aka admin. Here is Jason Script http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/archive/2010/10/19/configmgr-client-startup-script.aspx it works for AD but I’m sure with a bit of work you can get it to work on Novell too. http://www.enhansoft.com/