Hi there, we were planning to use SCCM for reporting on asset inventory and license. But now we discovered that there is no possibility to do reporting on all existing machines due to following reasons: machines that have been removed and deleted in AD still appear in the report (is there a status field to find out they have been deleted in AD?)We have lots of machines which are offline for long time, AD Discovery is the only possibility to keep them in SCCM so they are not outdated and deleted, after some time even DNS entry is removed. Is there a possibility to ignore non-existence in DNS (as described in AD discovery and unresolvable machines)? We definitely need to import the AD data also for those machines, this dependency on DNS does not make any sense!Empty fields (extended object attributes like title) in AD are not replicated correctly into SCCM (especially empty title for users, maybe even empty department and empty description), we did not yet find the correct source for this problem Is there any possibility to fine-tune these features? Otherwise SCCM seems not to be a useful reporting platform for asset management. Thanks, Torsten.

As a first step you need to define maintenance tasks. Have you already scheduled? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632595.aspxAnoop C Nair - @anoopmannur MY BLOG: http://anoopmannur.wordpress.com User Group: ConfigMgr Professionals This posting is provided AS-IS with no warranties/guarantees and confers no rights.

One quick, initial point: ConfigMgr is not an asset management tool, it was not designed to be one so you've partly suffering from square peg round hole syndrome. As Anoop pointed out, the built-in maintenance tasks can help delete systems from ConfigMgr that no longer are being discovered. Additinally, you should implement Client Status Reporting (CSR) which is part of R2/R3. It will help you identify any client systems which are no longer active and mark them as inactive and thn using a maintenance task delete them from ConfigMgr. Also, is your min rule in AD -> report, not in AD don't report? If so, why not add a task to your system decommissioning process to remove the system from ConfigMgr at the same time it is deleted/disabled in AD? That would easily address the issue. Jason | http://blog.configmgrftw.com | Twitter @JasonSandys

One quick, initial point: ConfigMgr is not an asset management tool, it was not designed to be one so you've partly suffering from square peg round hole syndrome. I assume and hope Microsoft sees this different. The official view on SCCM is: Asset Intelligence: Configuration Manager 2007 gives you better control over your IT infrastructure and assets. Its asset intelligence technologies that provide administrators with continuous visibility into what hardware and software assets you have, who is using them, and where they are located As Anoop pointed out, the built-in maintenance tasks can help delete systems from ConfigMgr that no longer are being discovered. Additinally, you should implement Client Status Reporting (CSR) which is part of R2/R3. It will help you identify any client systems which are no longer active and mark them as inactive and thn using a maintenance task delete them from ConfigMgr. Also, is your min rule in AD -> report, not in AD don't report? If so, why not add a task to your system decommissioning process to remove the system from ConfigMgr at the same time it is deleted/disabled in AD? That would easily address the issue. Sure I can think of possibilities deleting objects in SCCM or even keeping the history (that's why I asked for a status field like "deleted in AD"). The bigger problem is how to get Clients in that for some reason do not have a DNS entry (DNS error, long time offline, in Homeoffice, etc.): How do I find out, a client that exists in AD does not have a client yet - when I do not even find it in the "All Systems" collection?How can I make a License report when some Clients are missing just because they have been switched off for some time? Microsoft provides Asset and License reports in SCCM - so how can the answer to my question be "It's not a tool for Asset Management"... BR, Torsten.

machines that have been removed and deleted in AD still appear in the report (is there a status field to find out they have been deleted in AD?)We have lots of machines which are offline for long time, AD Discovery is the only possibility to keep them in SCCM so they are not outdated and deleted, after some time even DNS entry is removed. Is there a possibility to ignore non-existence in DNS (as described in AD discovery and unresolvable machines)? We definitely need to import the AD data also for those machines, this dependency on DNS does not make any sense!Empty fields (extended object attributes like title) in AD are not replicated correctly into SCCM (especially empty title for users, maybe even empty department and empty description), we did not yet find the correct source for this problem #1: others already mentioned the maintenance tasks. You can configure them to remove clients after a given period of time. #2: AD discovery relies on name resolution, too. That's the way the product was designed. Feel free to file a DCR (design change request) on connect.microsoft.com. #3: you could leverage SQL for reporting purposes. Just add a linked server to Active Directory (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa772380(v=vs.85).aspx) and you are able to query both data source (the ConfigMgr database plus AD). Torsten Meringer | http://www.mssccmfaq.de

Visibility does not equal management. They are two very different things. System Center Service Manager is the Asset Management tool from Microsoft. ConfigMgr discovery, as Torsten pointed out, was not designed to be a synchronization method -- it is simply a discovery method as its name implies. There are many reason a system may not exist in AD and yet still be valid or at least still have data that you want available. Similar to AD itself, there are no assumptions made about when to retire systems. At the end of the day, this is a simple script to both delete (or disable) the object in AD and delete the record in ConfigMgr. This can also eaily be auotmated with Service Manager and or Orchestrator.Jason | http://blog.configmgrftw.com | Twitter @JasonSandys