In the interest of staying agile and ensuring closer engagement with our customers, I’d like to open up a design question to all our readers.
The team’s been working on a fix for a scenario which was not fully considered in the original design and we’d appreciate your input as we’re adjusting the spec.
Problem Description
If the software installed on a computer gets updated (version changes), the old relationship in SCSM gets deleted and a new one is created in its place. So say Office is updated from Office 2010 to Office 2013. The old relationship between the device and Office 2010 is deleted and a new one with Office 2013 is created in its place – this so far is expected behavior. *However*, when software is reinstalled (e.g. the version remains the same, such as when a user reinstalls Office 2013), upon ConfigMgr connector sync, Service Manager ends up deleting the old relationship but *does not* create a new one in its place, thus causing the reported software installs between SCSM and ConfigMgr to go out of sync.
Possible Approaches
During the sync, we check CMDB to see if the computer/software relationship has the same version, and if so…
- Approach 1: we keep the old relationship, but update it with the new InstalledDate property
- Approach 2: we delete the old relationship and create a new one in its place with all new information
Here’s how you can help
We’d like your help to get a better understanding of the expected behavior from your point of view. Which of the two approaches outlined above work better? Also, what are the pros and cons (if any) of the above approaches from the license tracking, reporting and auditing standpoints. Please share your responses in the comments section below :)