SMS: Advertisements to Users and User Groups

• Microsoft Systems Management Server version 2.0

SUMMARY

In Systems Management Server 2.0, the process for delivering packages to clients provides increased flexibility through the concepts of dynamic collections and advertisements. Packages can now be advertised to user accounts independent of the computer. This leads to questions, for example, about how advertisements will be handled if the user account is logged on to multiple computers simultaneously and how the status will be reported if it fails on some computers, but not others. This article addresses questions about how advertisements and status messages are handled in Systems Management Server version 2.0.

MORE INFORMATION

When you are ready to make a program in a package available to clients, you advertise the program to a target collection. Systems Management Server 2.0 uses collections to determine which clients receive an advertisement for a program. You define and populate collections by setting membership rules for each collection. Membership rules are the criteria by which Systems Management Server evaluates whether a resource is a member of a particular collection. Systems Management Server periodically evaluates resources against the membership rules. As resources are discovered, Systems Management Server includes them in any collection whose rules they satisfy. A membership rule can be query-based (consists of the results returned by a query) or direct (resource-based and consists of a list of users or user groups).

A status message is similar to a message written to a log file. As components carry out their tasks, they report status by creating status messages periodically and introducing them into the Systems Management Server status system. The status summaries contained in the SMS Administrator console tree provide a snapshot of the health of your Systems Management Server site, components, packages, and advertisements. When you detect a problem at the snapshot level, you can start the message viewer to identify the problem more specifically. Each time a package is run, a status message is generated.

Status messages for the advertisement will be returned from each computer on which the advertisement was executed, there will be success or failure messages from each computer for each user that ran the advertised program. The advertisement status in the Administrator UI displays the total number of messages received for the advertisement by site and type (success versus failure, and so forth). The Advertisement Summarizer will report each message that is received from all clients for all advertisements, regardless of how many clients receive the advertisment.

The Offer Data Provider (ODP) checks for the existence of advertisements that are valid for the logged on system, user, or the user group memberships. Windows NT clients have two executables. The Odpsys32.exe file checks for advertisements for the system (Odpsys32.log) and the Odpusr32.exe file checks for advertisements for the user (Odpuser32.log) or user group memberships (Odpwnt32.log). On Windows 95 and Windows 98 clients , the Offer Data Provider component is Odpwin9x.exe (Odpsys32.log), which performs the checks for the system, user, and user group memberships.

The ODP finds the .ins file in %Client Access Point%\Cap_<SiteCode>\Offerinf.box\<SiteCode>System.lkp, User.lkp, or Usrgrp.lkp. ODP then loads the advertisements from the .ofr file (or files) listed in the .ins file and sends them to the Advertised Programs Manager.

If an advertisement is targeted to a user account or user group and the same user account is logged on at multiple computers simultaneously when the Odpuser32.exe runs at its scheduled interval (default of 60 minutes), it looks for advertisements to the user account that is logged on and presents that advertisement at the local computer. Advertisement information is stored on the local computer, therefore, each computer is unaware that the same user ran the program on a different computer. For that reason, the same advertisement should be presented on all computers that the user logs on to after Odpuser32.exe runs. If that is not the intended result, you need to advertise to the computer itself, or create a query that looks for both the user and the computer designation, which allows the advertisement to be presented only when that user is at a specific computer.

Additional query words: apm prodsms

Keywords : kbSMS200 kbAdvertisement
Version : winnt:2.0
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbinfo