So I'm finally back home and catching up on about a million e-mails I received last week while I was at MMS. I thought it only appropriate to post a quick message on my myITforum blog to publicly acknowledge the great work and level of community participation within the myITforum community and beyond that myITforum represents. Finally being able to put faces to the names I've seen on the myITforum SMS e-mail list over the years was a great experience for me personally. As a long time member of the SMS list, it was great to see myITforum really blossoming into a power of its own at MMS; the mad rush for the myITforum booth when the expo opened was something that had to be seen to be believed! My astonishment at actually obtaining a myITforum party badge was only surpassed by my amazement of being an award recipient at the party--which was probably obvious to anyone there by the dumbfounded look on my face when my name was called! Thank you again for that and the certificate will be proudly displayed on my office wall Monday (I'm still afraid to show my party button in public for fear of being mugged for it!) :-) This was my first MMS representing Microsoft as a speaker, but I felt amazingly little pressure speaking. It felt more like talking to a group of friends than a public speaking engagement.
p.s. Next year Todd owes me a coffee for calling my name out in the ask the experts session during my "coffee break" lol
A question came up during the MMS 2007 "Ask the Experts" session about Decommissioned DDR Processing (introduced with SMS 2003 SP2). I wasn't a member of the panel, but I did speak a little about it then. Because of the confusion about this subject, I thought I'd create this post to get the word out a little more about the behavior. Rather than reinvent the wheel, and because it's a pretty small part of the original document I wrote for the What's New in SMS 2003 SP2 documentation, I've just C&P'd the relevant text to this blog entry. The official What's new in SMS 2003 SP2 documentation can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sms/sms2003/whatsnewsms2003/f679a216-d357-4139-9343-85837327c865.mspx?mfr=true
Decommissioned DDR Processing in SMS 2003 SP2
SMS 2003 SP2 adds the ability to send notification of client record deletion to the parent site and then propagate that notification up the hierarchy.
Decommissioned discovery data record (DDR) processing is not enabled by default. To enable decommissioned DDR processing, set the DecommissionNotification registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\SMS\Components\SMS_Discovery_Data_Manager\DecommissionNotification to a value of 1 on the child site where you want to enable the feature. It is recommended that you enable this on only one site per hierarchy branch to avoid redundant decommissioned DDRs for clients propagating throughout your site hierarchy.
After decommissioned DDR processing is enabled, a child primary site will create and send a special decommissioned DDR to the parent site, notifying the parent site of the client record deletion. The decommissioned DDR adds a new decommissioned attribute to the existing client record at the parent site and sets its value to 1. The client’s decommissioned attribute value is then propagated up the hierarchy.
This feature does not delete items from the parent site, but by querying for the attribute, you can report on decommissioned systems.
After a client record has been decommissioned, it can be reset only by receiving a DDR that has Client = 1 from any discovery methods that have been enabled.
This posting is provided "AS IS' with no warranties, and confers no rights.