[Samba] What management of samba is available for large scale deployment

[D G Teed]

I'm working for a higher education institution, and we have Novell Netware
for our file sharing services.  We are looking at what migration paths
are available.

I know samba works, we use it on a number of Solaris and Linux boxes and
have it authenticate against our Windows ADS.  Manually editing samba
confiiguration files for up to a hundred users is OK.  The challenge is how
do you manage a few thousand users with backends that auto-populate
the samba config and front ends which administrators can tweak as needed?

Does someone make a product which helps with the management of Samba and
provide features like autocreation of groups to support shared permissions
on folders, etc?  If not a product, has there been a guide on how to
deploy samba with a large number (5000) of users and a large number
(perhaps 300-500) groups?

Having a product which permits users to self-administer their share
and allow read or write access to certain users or groups would be ideal.

--Donald Teed