Forcing immediate software package distribution in SMS 2003

A lot of people have been asking about it…

I have been shortly engaged by a customer using Novell ZENworks and wanting to convert to SMS 2003. One of the functionalities in ZEN lacking in SMS is the possibility to immediately force updates onto clients. SMS has its policy detection cycle, which takes some time, depending on how you configure it. And you can’t go too low with the interval in large environments due to performance constraints. But “where’s a wish there’s always a way” as they sayJ

You will find some tools on www.myitforum.com that allow you to right-click on a system/collection and force the detection cycle (as well as a couple of other things). It is not easy to find those tools. I tested some of them and this is what I would advise:

https://www.myitforum.com/inc/upload/11095AdvCliActions.zip

It is the one of 2 tool packages that has a nice automated installation method AND the only one that allows actions not only on systems, but also collections. Here is a screenshot showing the available options on collection:

It’s still an open question, which I will try to get an answer to: will this functionality be built into SMS v4? Or will we still need to develop scripts around SMS to provide this.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2006
  That is a great way to force the advertisement.  One thing to note with these tools is that the person running the SMS Admin Console must be a local administrator on the workstation.
  
  Another way of accomplishing this is to modify either the user's logon script or computer startup script so that it runs a Machine and User Policy refresh.  This will give the functionality of Zenworks because even with Zen the user has to log off and back on again for the app to show up.
• Anonymous
  April 07, 2006
  You're totally right, Tim. I did not mention this in the entry. Funny thing how I learned about the ZEN functionality. The customer was talking that ZEN is sooo great, that it can force updates onto machine. So I researched and found the above method. I felt it is a bit of a workaround rather then a real built-in solution. And then he tells me that an admin calls his users to do a logoff/logon to force the updates;)) Is this how we supposed to do automation and full-blown management... I don't thinks so:)
  bye...
• Anonymous
  April 01, 2008
  I've used several versions of ZENworks over the years and while you're correct that the action of logging the user off and then on again will result in the force-running of application objects configured to FR it's certainly not required.  This is because the ZEN Agent performs a policy refresh during logon.  ZEN like SMS has a client refresh schedule and in our case FR objects ran very quickly.  We've since migrated to SMS 2003 SP3 and will be implementing SCCM 2007.  I've found that are a few things SMS does well as there as things that ZEN does well.  ZEN tends to be more "lightweight" on both the server and client sides which allows many organizations to ramp down the client refresh schedules so that in the case of FR objects they run very quickly.  It's not as easy to this with SMS and not negatively impact your environment. ~B