What are the Top Reasons for Non-compliance?

This is a very fundamental question for Admins trying to raise the level of software update compliance at their company.

Traditionally using SMS 2003, the normal practice was to look at a sample of client logs and use that as a basis for guessing what the top problems were for non-compliance.

In SCCM 2007, we have added a couple of new reports that can help solve this problem for Scan and Deployment, "Troubleshooting 1 - Scan Errors" & "Troubleshooting 2 - Deployment Errors" which displays groupings of the last error received from clients.  You can sort by the "count" column to get a stack-ranked list of these errors, which can greatly increase the accuracy in determining the exact top non-compliance issues and dramatically reduce the time & effort required to make the assessment. 

No more scrubbing through client logs! 

In real-life deployments within MSIT and TAP customers, we used these reports constantly to quickly identify problem areas such as Group Policy conflicts, low WUA version, networking issues, and SUP configuration issues.  By addressing the top problems, customers were able to eliminate major sources of failures and achieve much greater compliance numbers.