Alfresco offers a rich remote API using its WebScripts technology which is based on the REST paradigm. This projects provides a set of scripts that makes it more easy to interact with the repository and its exposed resources.  Create or change users, create sites, manage group membership form the command line instead of the user interface.  Also great for automation: Create some hundreds of users from a table and automatically add to a set of groups? This becomes a one liner with the Alfresco shell tools.