Re-image Macs in bulk and administer them I've been called in to deal with the IT infrastructure of a small non-profit organisation that is going through a restructure. They have 6+ Mac Minis, an iMac, a MacBook, a MacBook Pro and a Mac server (not a Mac Pro, a silver desktop box).

I'm presented with the need to take backups of hard drive content, and then re-image them with 10.8, reinstalling Microsoft Office 2011.

With 10+ computers, downloading the OEM OS version 10+ times via Recovery, and then updating seems slow and pointless.

How can I re-image all these Macs in a sane way? Coming from a Linux background, this all seems overly complicated.

Bonus points if someone can point me to some free software that will help me administer all of these. I watched Google's talk on the matter, but there didn't seem to be anything out of the box.
Nice thing about the Mac OS is it can be cloned, even while it is running. 

What you want to do is create a bootable disk exactly as you want everything to be. Install applications as desired, create one user (admin) that you will use for maintenance. If you are using Open Directory it's a bit more involved but not much.

With only a dozen or so machines you can do them manually in under a day.

The process I would use is:


Create the working image on what will be your computer. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy it, file mode, to external drive A. Partition drive A to be only a hundred megabytes or so larger than the data (important for next step)
Attach the hardware to your desktop in target disk mode (hold T on startup - it now behaves like an external firewire case. Yes, you need a firewire cable. No, doesn't work with USB.)
Copy (finder drag works fine) computer -> Users -> theirName to Large External Drive B
Go back to Carbon Copy Cloner. Source disk: Drive A. Destination: other computer in target mode. Copy type: Block (you may need to enable this mode in preferences. Wait. Repeat from step 2 as needed.


The first clone-to-external in file mode means that everything is linearized and doesn't include things like /tmp/ and /swap/. The second clone in block mode is  lot faster and doesn't have the write-amplification issues if the destination is an SSD.