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.