Sorry if the title doesn't make a bunch of sense, but essentially I've had a few people ask me lately if there was some sort of more dynamic alternative to SCCM to handle things like reimaging machines or updating software on them. The main problem with a tool like SCCM is you have to manually download the software, manually create the package to update said software, create or update the device collection to update software/install upon imaging, and then make sure it all works with a lot of redundant testing. Personally, I believe that 2017 should be the year of automation. Software that follows a standard practice should be able to be auto-deployed without any fuss with a decent to use web-based interface. What's really the worst part is that reimaging a computer you have to setup a static task sequence that may have more or less applications than you need, and still requires having somebody manually touch the machine to reimage it in most cases.
What I plan on doing is taking a web interface and hooking it so that it makes SSH calls to powershell, which will hit MDT, create the applications, and can be used to create a dynamic software deployment. You can still have your standard "static" deployments, but say you've got a user that needs 5 other things you can just drag and drop them into the deployment, and set a time for it to being reimaging. It would create a temporary task sequence that would be deleted upon the system finishing imaging, and just save it in case you choose to use it again. Most of this is fairly easy work, but there's nothing out there that allows you to do this easily through a web interface, or that really allows dynamic windows deployments that I've seen.
Any questions or was this just a crazy rant?