Professional SMS 2003 Administrator's Reference

As the core technology essential to IT departments for managing desktop hardware and software in a Windows(r) environment, Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 is the hot Microsoft tool of choice for applying security patches, installing applications, and applying updates. This book discusses the steps you need to take to ensure that SMS 2003 is administered successfully to provide powerful management across an enterprise.While the main focus is on SMS 2003 with Service Pack 1, author and Microsoft MVP Ron Crumbaker also covers SP2 while guiding you through the inner workings of SMS 2003 to help you gain control of all the aspects of systems management. Each chapter uses real-world examples and covers an SMS feature and an administrative task, ultimately showing you how you can use SMS 2003 to successfully administer an SMS 2003 environment.You'll start working with SMS 2003 and this book by setting up your site hierarchy. From there you'll move on to managing SMS roles and security. You'll do extensive work with clients, discovering and inventorying resources and metering software use. Along with seeing the power of collections and packages, you'll learn to work with SMS reports to give you a structures view of your SMS data and to interpret SMS messages to keep the system running smoothly. The book wraps up by introducing some of the third-party extensions you can add to SMS to solve specific additional needs and gives you the power of automating repetitive SMS functions with scripts.