We're a small company, but finding significant deficiencies in SCE regarding Software Inventory (only what Add/Remove Programs shows you, not the version of the Update) and also Software Distribution (no custom command, no forced reboots, no dependencies, etc.) Having exeprience (a long time ago) with SMS 2.0, I would like to *test* SCCM now, but do not want to negatively impact my users who are using SCE. Can I install SCCM without distrupting the SCE clients?

SCE adds two GPO's that are at the center of my concern: One places FW rule exceptions in for every computer in the domain, so that the SCE server can install it's agents on the Client machines The other is applied to an Active Directory group (new for me, I've never seen a GPO applied to a group and not an OU before), and that sets where the WUAU client points to (intranet, rather than Microsoft.com) I remember, and I'm showing my age here, knowing that when I installed SMS 1.2, it updated the Login Script for everyone to add the client and caused all kinds of havoc on a 10k client PC network. I was pre-informed of that issue. I guess I'm jsut trying to avoid that disaster with SCCM.

No, I got it. I have *never* looked at the bottom of the Group Policy Management screen where it says "This GPO applies to...", or maybe I did, but 100% of the time it said "Authenticated Users". I've been banging my head against the wall trying to figure this magic out. Thanks again. I hope SCCM works out for me, despite being a small (30 server/200 client) company. The inability to distribute msp, msu, etc. is ridiculous. Or forcing reboots or dependencies. This is crazy, since all I'm trying to do is deploy Microsoft software (Dynamics CRM 4.0 and it's non-cumulative rollups.)

you have security filtering and you have WMI filtering. I think you are referring to security filtering but you get the idea. :-) John Marcum | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jmarcum |