Windows – SCCM – How to increase/decrease the interval time when adding a computer to a device collection

Firstly, SCCM 2012 isn't actually flat, you can (and should) create folders to organize your different types of collections in the console.

Secondly, I realise that doesn't really answer your question because you're asking about how to deploy settings, applications, updates, etc to a group of collections at the same time, and folders don't help with this.

The way that we do this is by using "Include Collections" (and "Exclude Collections") membership rules. You create what would have been your parent collection, and then add "Include Collections" membership rules to that collection for what would have been your sub-collections. This ends up being much more flexible than the old system because you can easily Include different combinations of collections into your new "parent" collections.

For instance we have a number of collections for server patching based on the servers job, location, risk level and where it sits in our patch cycle, this will then be included in one collection to get its maintenance windows (usually based on something like its location/time zone or usage pattern) and included into a second collection to get its list of approved updates deployed (usually based on its job and risk level), eg:

I doubt you'll be able to resolve this if this is true "I don't have backend server access to the management points, or the DPs".

Can you access the distmgr.log on the site server? If not, then you will need to escalate the issue to someone who can.

This issue is nothing to do with the client so I would ignore other answers advising to look at the clients. This issue is caused because the Site Server cannot copy the files from your source folder to the distribution point.

If you can't access the Site Server logs, one thing you could try to eliminate it being down to your folder structure being too long is to zip up your package, deploy it, and unzip before installing at the client end.