Possibilities

My mind boggles at the potential to build incredible things from free and built-in functions within Windows and other Microsoft products.  Then there's all the bazillion freeware third-party tools out there and the result is unlimited possibilities for automating your environment.

For example, the DriverView utility from NirSoft is a standalone runtime (akin to Sysinternals' utilities) which runs without requiring a dedicated installation.  Better yet, beyond the fact that it does an amazing job of reporting driver information, it provides a robust command-line interface as well.

Just one example: you could run a command-line statement to dump all the driver information for each computer to an XML file and import the data into a database for collective/aggregate reporting.  Hmmm.