Local Gov identity and/or system management

We're a small County Gov. and almost entirely a Novell shop. We don't have any Domain or AD implementation and no centralized management for our workstations. We have had almost no Windows server up to this point.

We're considering starting up Active Directory and pairing that with Identity Manager but we're not too fond of all the MS licensing we're going to need for that. That also doesn't address our system management needs of course (besides what AD would give us). I'm still trying to understand what kind of function overlap there is between IDM and ZenWorks.

What are other local government shops using these days for ID management or system management? Anything you'd do differently?