While there's a certain amount of satisfaction involved in rolling out your own solution to a problem, I can't help but feel that perhaps you may be re-inventing the wheel here.

As you say yourself, ePolicy is not a cheap package, and, as is to be expected when you shell out large amounts of money for a software solution, it does the job it sets out to do very well.

While I'm not saying that Perl couldn't do the job as well - in fact I'm certain it could - I think the fact remains that the money has already been spent - and any saving that writing an in-house solution could offer has already vanished. Once coding, debugging, rollout problems and other coding and release issues have been worked around, I feel that any time saved doing this could well be negligable.

On the other hand, it does sound like it'd be very intersting to put this project together ... which is the most important argument for doing anything ...

Just some random thoughts ..
--Foxcub