Using Systems Management Server to Analyze Your Network Infrastructure
Using Systems Management Server to Analyze Your Network Infrastructure |
|
Often people analyze the data from reports to answer questions such as: "How much will it cost to upgrade client computers for Windows 2000?" or "How much should I bill this cost center?" However, it can be prohibitively labor intensive to do such analysis manually when many sites and computers are involved. Therefore, it might be more appropriate to extract the data to a tool that you would like to use for performing your analysis.
You can use the SMS Query Extract Tool to easily extract SMS data that can be helpful to Windows 2000 deployment to tools such as Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access. This is described in detail in the chapter "Reporting Options for SMS 2.0" in the Microsoft® Systems Management Server Resource Guide, which is part of the Microsoft® BackOffice® Resource Kit 4.5.
Your ultimate goal is to deploy Windows 2000, and you can use the data that SMS has collected to automate that process. The same queries that provide data for reports such as "Our Windows 2000–Ready PCs" can also be used as the basis of collections of computers in the SMS database to which Windows 2000 is advertised.
Similarly, as shown with the SMS product compliance subsystem, in order to be ready for Windows 2000 some computers might need to have their software upgraded. The collected software inventory data can also be used to target those computers for the appropriate upgrades, which can be delivered by means of SMS.
You might want to use tools other than SMS to install Windows 2000 or the application upgrades. Those tools also require a list of computers to target, and you can use the SMS data for that purpose as well. The data can be extracted using the techniques previously discussed, and the data can be imported into the other tools using whatever techniques they provide.
For more information about deploying Windows 2000 with SMS, see "Using Systems Management Server to Deploy Windows 2000" in this book. Deploying Windows 2000–compatible applications is done in a very similar manner.