I have a bit of a conundrum, and would like to see if anyone else has experienced this and what they've done to resolve.
With Altiris NS6, software delivery will push software to a machine, and the software will remain cached in the \Software Delivery\{GUID}\cache folder and show up in the altiris agent as an active package, that can be re-run by the user if necessary. If either a.) the computer is removed from the collection, or b.) the software is archived on the NS, that software may be deleted from the cache folder if it is configured to remove after x days.
It appears, however, that the above scenario is impossible to accomplish with Altiris NS7. After pushing software to a machine with NS7, it runs and immediately disables itself. You can only see the software if you view "expired" packages, and the user cannot re-run the software when needed. If the package is configured to remove after x days, it will remove itself even while the machine remains in the filter for that package. This is not ideal, because we may need to uninstall and reinstall, or repair the package down the road, and we typically do that via the cached install files on the machine. If, however, we turn off the setting to remove the package after x days, then the package will remain on the machine long after it has been removed from the collection, and the amount of space used by software delivery will continually increase as new and updated packages are released.
We would like to utilize NS7 in the same way that NS6 was designed. One way that we've found that sort of accomplishes this goal, albeit in a very hack-y way, is to create multiple schedules for the application. The primary schedule is the time we want the application to run (say, Tuesday at 2A.M.). The secondary schedule is some arbitrary future date (say 01/01/2030). This way, the package will remain enabled and the files will remain cached on the machine because it is scheduled to run again. The drawbacks to this approach are as follows:
1. It's a bit cumbersome because the NS7 console UI doesn't allow you to actually create multiple schedules with different dates. You can pick different times on the same date, but the UI doesn't allow you to pick different dates. The underlying advertisement does actually support different dates, so we were able to accomplish this by exporting the advertisement as XML, modifying the XML to include the new schedule with future date, and reimporting the modified advertisement.
2. In the altiris agent UI, it's more difficult to view packages that legitimately need to run in the future, because now all tasks have a future run date. It's also a bit kludgy to see run dates that are 20 years from today, and may confuse users and/or IT.