SCCM – Is It Overkill for Medium-Sized Organizations?

sccmsccm-2012windows 7

I am an IT technician in a high school with around 1600 students 250 staff and 800+ client computers mostly running Windows 7. Our team is composed of three members. My boss seems content with a network that works (just about) not necessarily a productive well maintained network that is easy to run and maintain. I'm still fairly early on in my I.T. career so I'm not up to speed on all the different endpoint management solutions that are available.

I'm looking for a better way to manage clients (deploy software, track changes, inventory etc) I like the look of SCCM 2012's features but the case studies seem to be aimed at large multi-site infrastructural rather than a single mid sized site.

Is SCCM suitable for a mid sized single site or is it aimed at much larger corporations? How can I determine whether or not an endpoint management solution like SCCM is a good fit for our organization?

EDIT: Thanks for all the help I'll take a look at SCE and SCCM and get some proposals drawn up to take to my boss/deputy head

Best Answer

I would not call 800+ computers "mid sized". I was successfully deploying the successor of SCCM in a bank with 850 employees. In your case it is a lot more likely nowt knowing your tools that will be the problem - somehow I have a problem imagining the team of 3 people in a school being the highly competent people that companies employ for a lot more money. The learning curve WILL be brutal for you.

But once you are over it, it will help a lot - the whole System Center suite. 800+ machines is WAY too big to run around to install stuff.

Related Solutions

SCCM 2012 SP1 – DownloadContentFiles() failed with hr=0x80041013

Perhaps the REV site code was used for a temporary test installation of SCCM 2012? Perhaps not. Institutional knowledge doesn't have any record of the REV it and the migration we performed before I was hired.

This hunch was correct. I got a hold of my predecessor and apparently the first and unsuccessful attempt to migrate from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2010 used the REV site code. How it managed to sit dormant in WMI all this time and why it got "activated" is a complete mystery to me.

I very carefully re-read the solution in this TechNet post which advised deleting the old namespaces and decided to try that. I kind of hesitate to mark this as an answer even though it did resolve this issue, it indicates that I implicitly approve of it, especially since I couldn't get anyone "official" at Microsoft to confirm whether or not this was a safe approach or what the consequences were for doing this. That being said, make sure you have complete backups of your SCCM server or at least a much more intimate knowledge of WMI before proceeding. You could very easily break everything doing this, especially if like me, you're not familiar with WMI and how deeply SCCM leverages it.

I used wbemtest to connect to the root\sms namespace on our SCCM server. From there I used the [Enum_Instances...] button and search for __NAMESPACE as the superclass. I deleted the entry for the REV site code. I then did the same Enum_Instances for the SMS_ProviderLocation as the superclass and deleted the old site code from that namespace. Re-running the Automatic Deployment Rules and reviewing the PatchDownloader.log showed the successful downloading of each Windows Update.

WBEMTEST __NAMESPACE

WBEMTEST SMS_ProviderLocation

I would greatly appreciate more information about how these namespaces are used by SCCM and exactly how this fixed the issue if anyone has more detailed information.

SCCM Queries for Microsoft Visio Standard or Professional

This worked for me:

select SMS_R_System.Name, SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.DisplayName 
from  SMS_R_System 
inner join SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS 
   on SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.ResourceID =   SMS_R_System.ResourceId 
where SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.DisplayName like "%Visio Standard%" 
   or SMS_G_System_ADD_REMOVE_PROGRAMS.DisplayName like "%Visio Professional%" 
order by SMS_R_System.Name

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