As the core technology essential to IT departments for managing desktop hardware and software in a Windows 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.

What you will learn from this book

• How to secure SMS and maintain secure SMS infrastructure, accounts, and communication
• Using the SMS 2003 discovery methods to detect and inventory information across your networks
• Improving the process of delivering Windows and Microsoft Office updates with the Inventory Tool for Microsoft Updates (ITMU)
• Ways to configure policies to enable or disable "agents" on assigned SMS 2003 clients
• What an SMS software package is and how to create, use, and distribute packages to update software on clients
• How to best use third-party solutions to extend SMS functionality
• Techniques for configuring software metering to track client program usage to make the most of your software budget
• Best troubleshooting practices starting with preventing problems and understanding SMS status messages
• How to provide console and web-based reporting with dashboards and custom reports for hardware, software, sites, users, and more

Who this book is for

This book is for the SMS administrator who needs to manage the ever-increasing demands for operation excellence at the desktop and server level.