Collection Management

These are some general guidelines and information for collection management around dependency chains and refresh: 

• When you make a collection, its refresh schedule should not be any faster than daily.
  
  
• Full updates, whether scheduled or manual, will check for the ‘changed’ flag on collections at each level of the dependency chain. If no changes are pending, collections at the next level are not processed.  
  
  
• If a limiting collection has pending changes and is updated by schedule or manually, all dependent collections (Child, Include or Exclude collections) perform a full update when the limiting collection updates. 
  
  
• If there are unprocessed changes on an Incremental-enabled limiting collection BETWEEN incremental updates AND the collection is refreshed (manually or by schedule), a full update will be performed on the limiting collection and all items in its dependency chain. 
  
  
• All these scenarios also apply to removal from collections when a device is deleted or no longer in the limiting collection. 

The Microsoft documentation is sufficient for learning how to create collections in Configuration Manager.

Deploy packages and programs

If you're relatively new to ConfigMgr, here's a short video from LinkedIn Learning to help you.
Deploy packages and programs in Configuration Manager

Device restart notifications

For a full explanation see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/configmgr/core/clients/deploy/device-restart-notifications

It's important to note that with the default settings a user will not see a restart timer. If a user puts the device to sleep, it does not pause or interrupt the countdown. The amount of time after the deadline before a device gets restarted must be shorter than the shortest maintenance window.

Reports

You can access many pre-existing Configuration Manager reports from https://aus-sccm.austin.utexas.edu/reports/browse/ConfigMgr_AUS
For those of you that may be off campus, make sure to connect to the VPN in order to access the site.

List of built-in reports - Configuration Manager | Microsoft Docs

If you need a custom report to be created, please submit a ServiceNow request to the Core EPM Team by sending email to epm-requests@its.utexas.edu

Misc

• Client Health checks Client health checks - Configuration Manager | Microsoft Learn
  
  
• Client Status Monitor clients - Configuration Manager | Microsoft Learn
  
  
• Create a computer image with the Configuration Manager client preinstalled.
  For important information on that see: Deploy clients to Windows - Configuration Manager | Microsoft Docs
  
  
• Force a client to perform actions such as a hardware inventory, software update scan, deployment check, policy retrieval and evaluation cycle, or application deployment evaluation. This can be necessary if you need one or more of these actions to be processed faster than the default schedule. Client notification - Configuration Manager | Microsoft Learn
  
       From the control panel applet choose the appropriate cycle
       

Related Information