Both these features are welcome
tuning aids that should help IT managers stay more up-to-date, while not
drastically increasing the drain on
system CPU and network resources.
managers will spend waiting for
reports. Two new features, Dynamic
Collection Evaluation and Active
Directory Delta Discovery, operate by
looking only at what is new or changed
when reporting information.
In using Dynamic Collection Evaluation, I was able to scan for newly
added resources, including new
users’ systems and systems that were
newly provisioned with an operating
system, among other characteristics.
The scan occurs every 5 minutes, so
IT managers should ensure these
quick-but-frequent scans don’t place
an undo burden on network traffic.
Similarly, Active Directory Delta Discovery shows that Microsoft is getting
smarter about using valuable server
resources. Unlike with Dynamic Collection, I could change the default
5-minute interval used to discover
newly added computer, user, security
and system objects in Active Directory.
Enforcing compliance
If your organization is going
down the desktop compliance
road, SCCM’s increased policy and
enforcement tools can help. Desktop compliance is a sticky wicket to
enforce, and organizations that pursue compliance using SCCM should
understand up front the amount of
time and effort that will be needed
for a successful implementation.
The good news is that my tests
showed that once a desired configuration was decided on, the tool set
in SCCM will likely work to help get
user systems back in line through
the aggressive use of software distribution tools.
Because SCCM is big on operating system and application delivery,
that is the enforcement approach of
choice, as opposed to user privilege
restriction. When my systems went
out of policy, as determined by a
query of the SCCM database, I was
able to advertise application packages to those systems.
The query process and the advertising package delivery are complex
and will require SCCM expert staff
to implement. While the addition
of desired state capabilities is a nice
addition to SCCM, I recommend that
these features be used in conjunction with other user-right-restriction
products that help keep users from
going “off road” in the first place. ´
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR CAMERON STURDEVANT
CAN BE REACHED AT CSTURDEVANT@
EWEEK.COM.
This story can be found
online at:
tinyurl.com/4eoaplm
Collection membership can be more quickly updated by configuring SCCM 2007 to add
only newly discovered resources.
SCCM 2007 performs an intermediate discovery cycle that adds only new resources
to the database.
