SMS 2003: Some Tips For Successful Software Metering Rules

When trying to define software metering rules in the SMS 2003 Admin console, it has been noticed that using a language like 'English (United States)' in the language section of the metering rules may not provide satisfactory metering results depending on how the rule is configured.  What we generally like to recommend is that for best results, you should set the language to "Any" even if the Language settings of the file you are matching has the exact same Language version.  Language = 'ANY' seems to the best setting to use as this has consistently metered correctly.

In addition, you can use the "*" as a wildcard to select multiple possible matches.  To give you an example, the following settings could be used if we wanted to use a wildcard to select multiple languages or versions for one .exe file:

Filename: FILENAME.EXE
Original file name: = FILENAME.EXE
Version: *
Language: Any (don't use "Neutral")

Note that if you leave any of the fields blank, SMS will search for the literal value of NULL which results in no values being returned.

Hope this helps!

Manoj Kamath | Manageability Support Engineer