Let me start this by saying I know how helpful Active Directory (AD) can be. Unfortunately, our network admin has yet to learn this valuable life lesson ;)
We started out with Deployment Solution installed with AClient. We then upgraded to CMS Level 1 and installed a Notification Server since we do not have AD and our network is segmented with VLANs.
The challenge was to get the Altiris Agent deployed to each of the systems without the help of AD. To complicate matters, our systems are locked down with DeepFreeze since we are a college.
One of my staff members wrote a little script to get the systems unfroze and another script to refreeze them. We then created a Rapid Install Package (RIP) and installed the agent in the RIP. This allowed us to get the Agent on all of our lab systems and start using the NS console.