Best Practices for obtaining list of files?

System

I ask this after having read through some of the OD documentation and reading through many related threads on DevNet...

What is the "best practices" method(s) for obtaining a list of files to be deployed on the source server using OD 5.6? I'm using IWXML on the receiving server and that's working very nicely, but am wondering how to obtain the same info on the source machine. Is this generally done through workflow instead?

Dave

Current Environment(s):
(1) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K3
(2) TS 6.1 SP2 on W2K