I have owned some time to look into DS 7.6 and it seems like now it is feature complete in comparison to DS 6.9. However, this does not mean that you face some challenges to get it up and running. The main challenge seems to be to have the Symantec Management Agent installed very early in the OS Deployment process in comparison to DS 6.9 where I used to have the SMA as the last step that I do not have any Software Manage Delivery policies interfere with any other installs during the OS deployment process.
It seems like there are two ways to go. One way is to use filters and exclusions to add the computer to the exclusion filter during OS Deployment or the other way is to use applicability rule. It seems like applicability rule is better than filters because you do not need to care about any filter / target / policy updates.
Either way if you have an environment up and running in which you need to do some updates on a large scale you need to have some script to do the job and that is why I have looked into the process of adding a applicability rule to a software release using ASDK.
Here is a test software release and all the packages we use do not have any applicability rule.
I have the inventory rule which I called "IsInDeployment"
And this is what the script does it assigns the existing inventory rule to the software release.
To use this script you have to be locally on your Notification server. The following options are provided.
Running the script "cscript.exe AddApplicabilityRuleToSoftwareRelease.vbs ad140031-5522-4c9c-8914-6c7277b3e5c6 d267d4df-6d8d-4bbb-ab1c-2032e97e45af" will change one software release.
The first parameter stands for the software release guid and the second stands for the inventory rule guid.
The result for this test package looks like this:
Running the script "cscript.exe AddApplicabilityRuleToSoftwareRelease.vbs -f guidsoftwarereleases.txt d267d4df-6d8d-4bbb-ab1c-2032e97e45af" will go through a text file where you can add as many software release guids as you like. The second parameter stands again for the inventory rule guid.
The detection rule previous assigned to the software releases will be retained however, if you have already an applicability rule assigned it will be overwritten.