Automating Ubuntu Builds (or any Linux distro)

I'm wondering if anyone knows about software that can automate custom builds for Ubuntu. For example, pretend I am a sys-admin for company XYZ. And anytime we hire a new finance professional, I want to install Open Office, R or Octave, Package ABC, etc. on their machine. Anytime we hire a programmer, they should have Qt, Mercurial, gvim, etc. And so on.

I've google'd and come across debomatic, but I'm not sure if it's quite what I'm looking for. Also, any guides / blogs / articles / etc. that would help with this would als开发者_如何学JAVAo be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

PS - it would also be helpful if this could be done remotely after the software is installed too (e.g., if we decide to add Octave to everyone in finance because models are built using that software that are going to be needed for everyone going forward).

Here is one solution. Just create so-called metapackages "financialanalyst" depending on open-office, r-base, octave3.2, ... and "programmer" depending on libqt4-dev, vim, ...
It is not hard, it is useful, I have done it and you may want a local package repo anyway.

You couldcreate a custom script for the different builds you need. Something such as sudo apt-get install $list_of_packages_for_programmer would obviously be for your programmers. sudo apt-get install $list_of_packages_for_finance so on and so forth.