I like Windows and Linux for different reasons, however one thing I really like in Windows is the concept of group policies. For those unaware, group policies are policies you can set for objects(users/computers,etc). They allow you to set rules for the object in a very granular fashion. They make use of inheritance (so you can implement multiple policies for a single object) and don't actually change user account profiles so you can easily revert in case of problems. There are tool as well to see what changes a group policy applies to an object. As far as I can tell Linux doesn't seem to offer anything like this. I was wondering, for people who've ever managed a decent sized Linux network, do you use anything else or do you just use scripts?

built into the core of every Linux distro are
USER and GROUP permissions

normal users belong to the "users" group
ROOT belongs to it's own "root" group

just like ClamAV belongs to it's own "clamav" group

I had this issue just on windows and linux. But in linux the groups are not based on a name but rather a number called a gid. So say I have two different distro's installed, I create a group called bay(gid 1000.) on distro #2 I create a group called bay(gid 1006.) the users will not be able to share a folder with group permissions because the gid is different, even though the name is the same.
If I did this on windows, instead of a gid it's a computer name(mygroup/mycomputer or mydomain) but it still keeps track of a gid number internaly.
So say it gets more elaborate. Say I need a group called bay to modify folder contents but never allowed to delete files. In linux its either read or write. the only recourse I know is to have more than one copy of the file in question. One with read only permissions, and if they want to change it one folder to allow uploading changes. Whereas on windows I simply toggle the write permission and uncheck the delete.
But that becomes irrelevant in linux because say its a webserver file, it must be modified but the name must be the same. The only recourse is to impliment a SELINUX policy. This adds MAC control over the normal perms. But say I don't want to set that up, and instead want something simpler....