Customers of Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003—Microsoft's product for managing hardware and software assets, distributing software, applying patches, and tracking application usage—will need Service Pack (SP) 3 to manage Windows Vista systems with SMS. Just released into public beta and due for a late March 2007 release, SP3 also rolls up bug fixes and adds new functionality in the form of Asset Intelligence, a technology acquired though Microsoft's purchase of AssetMetrix, which provides more extensive hardware and software asset inventorying capabilities than SMS 2003's original asset tracking features.

Managing Vista with SMS

Although Microsoft updated SMS 2003's OS Deployment Feature Pack in Oct. 2006 so that SMS could deploy Vista system images (see "Updated OS Deployment Tool in Beta" on page 18 of the Aug. 2006 Update), SMS 2003 still could not inventory a Vista system or distribute any patches or software packages to it.

With SP3, SMS 2003 and SMS 2003 R2 servers get the same capabilities to manage Windows Vista clients as they do with Windows XP clients. This includes support for SMS's Inventory Tool for Microsoft Updates (ITMU), which enables SMS to detect and install patches on managed computers.

Asset Intelligence

In addition to rolling up bug fixes and providing full Vista support, SP3 adds a valuable new feature: Asset Intelligence.

Although SMS 2003 can inventory computers for installed software, it depends on developers to properly register their product in Windows' Add/Remove Programs Control Panel application, which many products don't do. Furthermore, the software industry has no consistent approach to product versioning, a standard list of publisher names, or standard ways of defining the relationships between multiple installed programs associated with a single license. For example, the Windows' Add/Remove Programs applet merely reports that the Office Professional suite is installed, but it doesn't say which specific component Office applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, etc.) were actually installed. For this reason, even with an inventory tool like SMS, it can be difficult to determine what applications are really installed on each computer and what licenses are needed.

With AssetMetrix, Microsoft has amassed a database of more than 400,000 "fingerprints" identifying various hardware components and software titles and versions and has created a taxonomy for categorizing those components and titles. SP3 installs this database into SMS 2003 and extends the SMS Hardware Inventory agent (a misnomer, because the agent also retrieves software-related information from the Windows Management Instrumentation repository on the managed system) so that the agent can collect more extensive data about the software and hardware from each managed computer. Administrators can use SMS's Resource Explorer to view the current data and a history of changes to a computer. SP3 also installs more than 30 new reports that query the collected data and the fingerprint database to generate more granular and accurate information for systems administrators, help desk personnel, and business decision-makers.

The new reports are grouped into three categories:

Hardware reports contain previously unobtainable information on managed computers, such as the estimated computer age or the types of USB devices on them.

Software reports detail information such as installed software by category and family, software set to start automatically installed on a specific computer, or computers with a specific browser helper object (such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in).

License reports identify information such as Microsoft license items by sales channel (such as volume licensing, retail, or OEM), computers with licenses nearing expiration, and a count of products managed by the Software Licensing Service (introduced with Windows Vista), which handles product activation and registers licenses.

Unfortunately, the last category, license reports, are limited to recent Microsoft products that use activation keys to prove that the product is licensed; these reports cannot track Microsoft or third-party licenses that consist of paper or electronic records. (See "Product Activation Comes to Business" on page 25 of the Dec. 2006 Update.)

Microsoft's Asset Intelligence database is frequently updated to include new products, but SP3 does not provide a mechanism to import those updates into the SMS database automatically. Microsoft plans to periodically publish downloadable update packs, which systems administrators will have to install manually. However, the next release of SMS, called System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and due for release in the second quarter of 2007, will include an automatic mechanism to keep its Asset Intelligence tables up-to-date.

Asset Intelligence to Be Offered in Two Forms

Microsoft also offers the Asset Intelligence technology as a subscription (the same model used by AssetMetrix): a tool remotely scans client PCs and then uploads the data to a Microsoft-hosted database. A Microsoft-hosted Web site allows authorized individuals to view reports on the software installed in their organization. However, in the summer of 2007 Microsoft plans to stop selling the stand-alone subscription of Asset Intelligence and fold it into the new Desktop Optimization Pack (DOP) subscription offering, which bundles the hosted Asset Intelligence service with the SoftGrid OS virtualization technology (from Microsoft's Softricity acquisition), advanced Group Policy management tools (from its DesktopStandard acquisition), and a Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (from its Winternals acquisition). The DOP will cost US$10 per computer annually and will be available only to customers who have purchased Software Assurance on their Windows client licenses. (See "Desktop Management Applications Become Subscriptions" on page 36 of the Nov. 2006 Update.)

Microsoft says that it will give "special consideration" to customers who have recently purchased an AssetMetrix subscription, but it did not publish specific details.

Customers who are already SMS 2003 customers or who plan to buy Configuration Manager 2007 will likely find the Asset Intelligence solution integrated with those products superior to the hosted service, in particular because SMS/Configuration Manager can use the inventory data collected by Asset Intelligence to target jobs such as installing software or making configuration changes. Whether or not those customers will be interested in the DOP will depend on the value they place on the other tools in it, particularly SoftGrid.

Resources

The public beta of SP3 can be obtained at connect.microsoft.com.

The updated SMS 2003 OSD feature pack that supports Vista deployment is available at www.microsoft.com/technet/downloads/sms/2003/featurepacks/osdfp.mspx.

SMS 2003 was detailed in "Stronger Systems Management Server Worth a New Look" on page 9 of the Nov. 2003 Update.