How to move a collection

This is one of those little known tricks of SMS/SCCM, but it can be handy.  I often run into customers who have SMS 2003 and their collection management is out of control for various reasons.  When going to SCCM they want to clean up their collections.  Deletion is the easy way to do that, but doesn’t work in all situations.  Here is how you can move a collection (or collection hierarchy) under another collection.

Let us say you have two root level collections named “parent” and “child”.  You want to put “child” under “parent”.  Child may or may not have other collections under it already.  To move child you would start by accessing the right-click menu on “parent” and choosing a new “Link to collection”.  In the dialog that comes up choose “child” and complete the dialog.  This will now put a copy of “child” under “parent”.

Notice the collection ID for the sub-node “child” is the same as the root-level “child.”  They are, essentially, one and the same so any change made to one, such as membership rules, will effect the other.  There is one exception however, deletion of the collection.  This is where your “collection copy” turns into a “collection move.”  Not that “child” is under “parent” you can delete the original root level “child” and the new sub-node “child” will not be deleted.

TaDa… collection moved!