Site boundaries are important

If you are in a single AD and you have multiple domains with SMS servers it is important for you to keep your boundaries out of other SMS servers. Configuring boundaries wrong can place computers in someone elses boundary or pull computers in. A adverse side affect of placing your boundary to the whole AD or not placing any boundaries at call can make your site the central site over all other sites. This will effictively disable all sms clients in the entire AD. Since they will consider their central/primary site as a proxy and will look to the "new" central site. Since computers cannot be controlled by that new site they will just sit in limbo until the site boundaries are fixed. A check of the Location Services.log file will confirm if boundaries are messed up for that client.

Query computers to find a specific file

First you will need to make sure that turn on the file inventory, not File collection (we don't want to copy all those files into SMS). A sample is shown to the left. Be sure to exclude the Windows directory at the least.

Once a SW inventory has run you will be able to pull this informaiton. Depending on the state of your machines it might take a while before all have run the check. Be aware that this could decrease the performance of the system if this is the first run of the search.

Now that we have all the information in SMS we need to get it out. The quickest way is to build a query. A more detailed approach would be a report.

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select SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.Name, SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.FilePath, SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.CreationDate, SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.FileDescription, SMS_R_System.ResourceType, SMS_R_System.ResourceId from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM on SMS_G_System_COMPUTER_SYSTEM.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId inner join SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile on SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_SoftwareFile.FileName = "test.pdf"

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This query can now be used to form a collection or exported to Excel. Limit the collection to the computers you see fit.

SMS Tools

Have you ever wondered how to extend the MMC for SMS 2003. There is a reg key that allows users to enter any kind of right click menu the system. It will be called SMS Tools.

To pull the right click tools to SCCM 2007 the guid is:
{58105356-2B9C-11D1-B0D5-00C04FBBD480}

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MMC\NodeTypes\{58105356-2B9C-11D1-B0D5-00C04FBBD480}\Extensions\SMS_Tools

To pull into SMS 2003
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MMC\NodeTypes\{4D26C0D4-A8A8-11D1-9BD9-00C04FBBD480}\Extensions\SMS_Tools\101]
"Description"="Client Assignment (ClientAssignment.exe)"
"Name"="Client Assignment"
"CommandLine"="C:\\Program Files\\SMS 2003 Toolkit 2\\ClientAssignment.exe"

==realize that this is for a specific computer. Please check out Microsoft for more guids that control SMS or simply open up your reg and you can see.

Use this to send a WMI command to a certain client or force a collection to perform a HW inventory. Though this started in SMS 2.0 it is still valid in 2003.

https://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms817015.aspx

There are many other places to find information. Once you learn the 3 or 4 nodes to use and how to create scripts or applications you can extend SMS far beyond the native deployment.

Here is an example of an sms tool http://sms-hints-tricks.blogspot.com/2007/11/sms-tool-what-collection-is-computer-in.html