SMS 2003 comes with tools for tackling problems arising during and after installation (see "Steering Clear of Trouble With the Right Tools,").With the maddening onslaught of security exploits that have surfaced over the past six months, keeping up with software updates and patches has become a bigger job than ever. SMS 2003's SUM (Software Update Management) simplifies this by automatically handling the distribution, inventory and reporting for security updates. We found it easy to create security update packages and advertisements to stamp out vulnerabilities. There's a wizard that walks you through the process. The advertisement installs the correct OS version of the patch for you, using inventory information culled from the workstation.
Unlike with 2.0, the update-management component is built into SMS 2003. To scan for the security updates in SMS 2003, you must download the tools from Microsoft. If your SMS 2.0 site has the SUS (Software Update Services) add-on, you must uninstall its update wizard before you go to 2003. During the upgrade, you can specify that you want to keep the old package, collections and advertisements from the original feature pack.
In our environment at the University of Michigan Health System, security-update packages--along with advertisements--had to be created on both SMS 2.0 and 2003 sites during the migration.
Another cool feature of SMS 2003 is its reporting tool, which is integrated into the SMS administration console. There are more than 160 predefined reports covering hardware, software and security data on your machines, and you can use these reports to evaluate gaps in licensing, hardware- compliance issues and security-patch deployment.
To enable the reporting feature, define a reporting point under the SMS Site System Properties (a server must run IIS 5.0 or higher to be a reporting point). The reporting mechanism also includes SMS' dashboard, a quick and easy way to display reports in a grid format. The dashboard lets you view multiple reports in a single table (see screenshot, page 85.)
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