Never edit a MOF file again!

Dudeworks plans Inventory Manager for SCCM 2007 release for October - November timeframe (www.dudeworks.com)

Inventory Manager

Offers administrators the ability to custom tailor SCCM ( System Center Configuration Manager ) inventory to suit the needs of their company and remove the complexities of editing configuration MOF files by means of an intuitive and easy to use graphical user interface (GUI).

Overview

Currently administrators must manually edit the code in two text files (sms_def.mof and configuration.mof) by hand if they want to customize hardware and software inventory by SCCM.  This requires knowledge and understanding of the programming language and syntax used in these files.  The work involved is tedious, time consuming, susceptible to typographical errors which cost the administrator even more headaches.  Even well experienced administrators and engineers can make mistakes here quite easily.

What’s it do

Replaces the manual, text based process with a front end editor that provides a GUI to allow the user to easily add, edit and remove inventory items from SCCM.  Provide a completely rule based management solution, which takes all the guess work out inventory and speeds the process of managing inventory rule items in SCCM to a few minutes rather than several hours or possibly days.

Reasoning

If every possible piece of client data was enabled in inventory, SCCM databases would be too large to manage, so SCCM has a certain set of data included out of the box.  Not long after the installation of SCCM, management often comes asking for information that isn’t being reported out of the box.  This is where administrators start reading up on MOF’s and do one of two things.  They either report back that SCCM can’t get the data, or they start down the laborious road of learning how to read and edit MOF files.