How to add a Known/Unknown Computer to a specified collection during OS Deployment

Have you ever wondered why a ConfigMgr client takes a long time to run the advertised programs after you deploy this client using ConfigMgr OSD? Well, this is because as soon as the machine is imaged, it gets added to the ‘All Systems’ collection and gets the advertisements/policies that are targeted to the All Systems collection. But what if your advertisements are not targeted to the default All Systems collection, and instead are targeted to a custom query based collection? In that case, the newly imaged machine doesn’t get added to the custom collection until it sends the inventory AND the collection updates based on its schedule and finds the machines that fulfill the query condition to add the machine(s) to the collection, and in turn triggering the creation of policies for these clients. Until this happens, there are no Advertisements for this newly imaged client to run(unless of course, they were targeted to the All Systems collection). This is why you may notice a delay of up to 24 hours or more until you see the newly imaged clients processing all the Advertisements that you expect them to execute.

One way to workaround this delay is to add the machine to the desired collection(s) manually, and give it about an hour to request for new policies. However, this is a tedious task. Another way is to somehow add the computer to the desired collection during the OSD Task Sequence run-time. This would result in the computer pulling all the policies targeted to the desired collection immediately after it is imaged. I wrote a script that can be used to do just that. All you need to do is to add a ‘Run Command Line’ task to the Task Sequence and specify the following Command line:

cscript AddMeToCollection.vbs <SiteServerName> <CollectionID> %_SMSTSClientIdentity%

In the above command line,
<SiteServerName> needs to be replaced with the SMS Site Server Name
<CollectionID> needs to be replaced with the desired Collection ID

Thats all that you need to edit in the above command line. However, you need to make sure that you run this command line as an account which has rights to connect to the SMS Provider. If the account running this command does not have the required rights, then the script will fail to execute. Regardless of the Success/Failure, you would see the return code in the SMSTS.log, which may be useful during troubleshooting.

You can find this script attached here. I hope you find this post useful.

IMPORTANT: Using the example above works in my lab, however information in this post is provided "AS IS" with NO Warranties, or Support.

Vinay Pamnani | Support Engineer