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Q199261: SMS: Advertisements to Users and User Groups

Article: Q199261
Product(s): Microsoft Systems Management Server
Version(s): winnt:2.0
Operating System(s): 
Keyword(s): kbsms200 kbAdvertisementkbfaq
Last Modified: 25-NOV-1999

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The information in this article applies to:

- Microsoft Systems Management Server version 2.0 
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SUMMARY
=======

In Systems Management Server 2.0, the process for delivering packages to clients
provides increased flexibility through the concepts of dynamic collections and
advertisements. Packages can now be advertised to user accounts independent of
the computer. This leads to questions, for example, about how advertisements
will be handled if the user account is logged on to multiple computers
simultaneously and how the status will be reported if it fails on some
computers, but not others. This article addresses questions about how
advertisements and status messages are handled in Systems Management Server
version 2.0.

MORE INFORMATION
================

When you are ready to make a program in a package available to clients, you
advertise the program to a target collection. Systems Management Server 2.0 uses
collections to determine which clients receive an advertisement for a program.
You define and populate collections by setting membership rules for each
collection. Membership rules are the criteria by which Systems Management Server
evaluates whether a resource is a member of a particular collection. Systems
Management Server periodically evaluates resources against the membership rules.
As resources are discovered, Systems Management Server includes them in any
collection whose rules they satisfy. A membership rule can be query-based
(consists of the results returned by a query) or direct (resource-based and
consists of a list of users or user groups).

A status message is similar to a message written to a log file. As components
carry out their tasks, they report status by creating status messages
periodically and introducing them into the Systems Management Server status
system. The status summaries contained in the SMS Administrator console tree
provide a snapshot of the health of your Systems Management Server site,
components, packages, and advertisements. When you detect a problem at the
snapshot level, you can start the message viewer to identify the problem more
specifically. Each time a package is run, a status message is generated.

Status messages for the advertisement will be returned from each computer on
which the advertisement was executed, there will be success or failure messages
from each computer for each user that ran the advertised program. The
advertisement status in the Administrator UI displays the total number of
messages received for the advertisement by site and type (success versus
failure, and so forth). The Advertisement Summarizer will report each message
that is received from all clients for all advertisements, regardless of how many
clients receive the advertisment.

The Offer Data Provider (ODP) checks for the existence of advertisements that are
valid for the logged on system, user, or the user group memberships. Windows NT
clients have two executables. The Odpsys32.exe file checks for advertisements
for the system (Odpsys32.log) and the Odpusr32.exe file checks for
advertisements for the user (Odpuser32.log) or user group memberships
(Odpwnt32.log). On Windows 95 and Windows 98 clients , the Offer Data Provider
component is Odpwin9x.exe (Odpsys32.log), which performs the checks for the
system, user, and user group memberships.

The ODP finds the .ins file in %Client Access
Point%\Cap_<SiteCode>\Offerinf.box\<SiteCode>System.lkp, User.lkp,
or Usrgrp.lkp. ODP then loads the advertisements from the .ofr file (or files)
listed in the .ins file and sends them to the Advertised Programs Manager.

If an advertisement is targeted to a user account or user group and the same user
account is logged on at multiple computers simultaneously when the Odpuser32.exe
runs at its scheduled interval (default of 60 minutes), it looks for
advertisements to the user account that is logged on and presents that
advertisement at the local computer. Advertisement information is stored on the
local computer, therefore, each computer is unaware that the same user ran the
program on a different computer. For that reason, the same advertisement should
be presented on all computers that the user logs on to after Odpuser32.exe runs.
If that is not the intended result, you need to advertise to the computer
itself, or create a query that looks for both the user and the computer
designation, which allows the advertisement to be presented only when that user
is at a specific computer.

Additional query words: apm prodsms

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Keywords          : kbsms200 kbAdvertisement kbfaq
Technology        : kbSMSSearch kbSMS200
Version           : winnt:2.0
Issue type        : kbinfo

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