I'm curious if someone can tell me the expected behavior of the SCCM client when it is installed to a machine that resides on a Windows domain and then that same machine, without having the SCCM client account or the AD computer account deleted first, is re-imaged to be a workgroup-based IBCM managed client. I have found that the SCCM client account will not update itself to detect the new "workgroup" status. My organization is constantly imaging machines onto the domain with the internal SCCM installation parameters (/native SMSSITECODE=XXX) and then when they're done with them for that particular task, they reimage them to a workgroup image with IBCM SCCM installation parameters (/native /native CCMALWAYSINF=1 CCMHOSTNAME=SCCM.COMPANY.COM SMSSITECODE=XXX). Should the client account be able to successfully detect a switch from one environment to the other or should we delete the SCCM and AD accounts prior to switching roles? For the record, we have tasks in place which delete AD computer accounts when they haven't contacted the domain in 90 days and then I have a SCCM task that deletes discovery data after 90 days, so technically any defunct AD computer account should be wiped from SCCM within 180 days. I have another question as well - not sure if I should make a new question or not - but I'm curious what is supposed to happen when an SCCM account is deleted from the database, but the client is still alive and well. Is it supposed to re-register itself or is it necessary to reinstall the client? I have noticed that if an SCCM computer account is deleted from the database, it will never come back on its own. Thanks for any assistance.

ConfigMgr agents don't care about or depend upon domain membership. Auto-site assignment might be affected by it, by the agent itself doesn't care one way or another and is ignorant of domain changes. As for the client re-registration, the official answer is that it is undocumented/undefined: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/configmgrgeneral/thread/453c00c9-0789-4341-98bb-3b43011fdb6f/Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys

That's because the system's name is not a unique identifier. Re-installing a machine will create a new resource for it in ConfigMgr regardless of the domain change; it will not use the same old resource. Thus, this only appears to be the same system in ConfigMgr because the resources have the same name. They are in fact different resources and you essentially have two resources with the same name, the new one and the old one which is no longer valid and should be marked as obsolete because the hardware ids match. There is no way for ConfigMgr to know what you're intentions are so it does not automatically clean up the old one immediately -- this cleanup is based on the delete obsolete data task.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys