The default collections provide some basic
resource groupings, but these won’t always be the best way to manage
your resources, especially when it comes to advertising package
programs to SMS clients. Instead, you can create your own collections,
grouping together your resources in as many logical units as makes
sense within your SMS site or site hierarchy.
Part
of creating a collection involves defining the collection membership
using membership rules. Recall that a collection’s membership rules can
be either direct, a manual method that requires more maintenance, or
query-based, which provides greater flexibility and less maintenance.
In this section we’ll look at how to create collections with both types
of membership rules.
Creating a Direct Membership Collection
To create a direct membership collection, follow these steps:
1. | Navigate to the Collections folder in the SMS Administrator Console.
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2. | Right-click
the Collections folder, choose New from the context menu, and then
choose Collection to display the Collection Properties dialog box shown
in Figure 1.
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3. | In the General tab, enter a descriptive name for your collection along with a descriptive comment if you like.
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4. | Select
the Membership Rules tab and click the Direct Membership button (the PC
with the yellow star) to launch the Create Direct Membership Rule
Wizard. Figure 2 shows the Create Direct Membership Rule Wizard welcome page.
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5. | Click Next to display the Search For Resources page, shown in Figure 3.
Select the resource class for the resource you want to add to the
collection. In the Resource Class drop-down list, the User Group
Resource and User Resource options will let you add members discovered
by the Windows User Account Discovery and Windows User Group Discovery
methods. The System Resource option relates to discovered computers.
For this example, select System Resource.
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6. | Select
the resource attribute on which you’ll base your membership choice.
Attributes include resource name, resource ID, IP information, domain
information, and so on. The attributes listed reflect the discovery
data collected for that class of resource. For this example, specify
Name.
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7. | Enter
the appropriate attribute value to look for when selecting members for
this group. The % sign is a wildcard character. In this case we’re
looking for all computers whose name begins with the letter “S.”
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8. | Click Next to display the Collection Limiting page, shown in Figure 4.
From this page you specify which existing collection to use to look for
the resources you identified. You can leave the field blank if you have
sufficient permissions to search the entire SMS database. Otherwise,
you must enter the name of a collection that you have permissions to
view.
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9. | Click Next to display the Select Resources page, as shown in Figure 5.
This page shows a list of the resources that match your membership
criteria—in this case, a list of all the computer names that begin with
the letter “S.” Select the resources you want to include in the
collection.
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10. | Click Next to display the Completing The Create Direct Membership Rule Wizard page, shown in Figure 6. You can also click the Back button to review or change your settings. Review your choices and then click Finish.
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11. | The resources you selected will now appear in the Membership Rules tab of the Collection Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 7.
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12. | In
step 8 you specified a collection to use to look for resources you
identified. In the Membership Rules tab, the Update This Collection On
A Schedule check box indicates the frequency with which Collection
Evaluator will browse the collection you specified to see if the
resource still exists. If the resource is no longer a member of the
specified collection, it will be removed from this new collection.
Collection Evaluator is the SMS thread component that performs
collection management tasks such as updating or refreshing collection
data. By default, the collection will be updated once a day. Click the
Schedule button to modify the collections update schedule.
Note The
minimum update interval is every 15 minutes. If you specify an update
interval of less than 15 minutes, the collections won’t be updated at
that interval. In addition, if you change the membership update
schedule, the first evaluation will have a delay up to 15 minutes. |
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13. | Click OK to create the collection and add it to the Collections folder.
The
Advertisements tab of the Collection Properties dialog box lists all
advertisements that have targeted that collection. The Security tab
lets you specify who can access this collection—and collections in
general—and to what extent they can administer the collections.
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