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How to move a collection

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This is one of those little known tricks of SMS/SCCM, but it can be handy.  I often run into customers who have SMS 2003 and their collection management is out of control for various reasons.  When going to SCCM they want to clean up their collections.  Deletion is the easy way to do that, but doesn’t work in all situations.  Here is how you can move a collection (or collection hierarchy) under another collection.

Let us say you have two root level collections named “parent” and “child”.  You want to put “child” under “parent”.  Child may or may not have other collections under it already.  To move child you would start by accessing the right-click menu on “parent” and choosing a new “Link to collection”.  In the dialog that comes up choose “child” and complete the dialog.  This will now put a copy of “child” under “parent”.

Notice the collection ID for the sub-node “child” is the same as the root-level “child.”  They are, essentially, one and the same so any change made to one, such as membership rules, will effect the other.  There is one exception however, deletion of the collection.  This is where your “collection copy” turns into a “collection move.”  Not that “child” is under “parent” you can delete the original root level “child” and the new sub-node “child” will not be deleted.

TaDa… collection moved!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    If you still have the original collections you can delete the new "mistake" collection (choose to delete the instance only) and try again.  If you are trying to move a collction back to the root level then things are not so easy.  I'm not aware of any way to do it through the UI. In my example above, if I go to "child" I can right click and there is a delete option.  Perhaps you need to refresh your UI to get the delete option to show up?

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2011
    Thanks it worked!!!!!

  • Anonymous
    December 27, 2012
    Thanks, That saved me a lot of time.

  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2013
    N-I-C-E TIP!!! One area missing from all the MS Documentation is "Best Practice Useage".  Its great that product is "flexible" but there are a million ways to do all this and its great to hear from Admins about "Best Practice" from trial and error.  

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2014
    This is brilliant!!!!

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2015
    Great, thanks a lot for this post!

  • Anonymous
    July 01, 2015
    Awesome Tip! Thank you. Saved me a whole lot of time and effort!

  • Anonymous
    October 15, 2015
    Thank this was helpful

  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2017
    Just came across this article (years later.. ha ha) and it worked for me. I made the "mistake" and deleted the "instance" and was fine... PHEW!