Software Update Inventory: Best Practices

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Use the best practices in this section to ensure that the scan component of the software update inventory tools performs optimally and reliably.

Tune the scan component advertisement schedule

  • Schedule the scan advertisement to the production collections every weekend for the Security Update Inventory Tool, every month for the Microsoft Office Inventory Tool for Updates.

  • Schedule the scan advertisement to the pre-production (reference) collection daily, optimized to follow the update to distribution points.

  • Do not link the scan advertisement schedule to the hardware inventory schedule. Configure the hardware inventory to use a simple schedule - once a week or every two weeks based on your existing policy and system loading. Use a more aggressive schedule for your collection of reference computers to monitor new and emerging issues in a timely manner.

Advertise the non-expedited program to the production environment

Do not use the expedited scan program in the production environment. A large-scale, expedited inventory results in a large amount of resynchronization transactions that are unacceptable in most production environments and should be avoided.

Advertise the expedited program to the pre-production collection

Using the expedited program in the pre-production collection helps you to respond quickly to emerging issues.

Do not use program dependencies in scan tool advertisements

The scan component of the software update inventory tools is set to run at regular intervals. If you specify a program dependency in this advertisement, the advertisement will run once and then subsequent occurrences of the advertisement will be skipped, because the dependent program was successful.

Disable the site-wide/per-program notifications for scan tool programs

The scan component runs as an unattended script on SMS client computers, and should remain as a background process that runs outside of the awareness of users.

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