Client Management Suite

Hello everyone. I'm rather new to CMS and would really appreciate any help the community can give.

The company I work for would like to distribute software based on department. This must be done with a hierarchical list which I have created in powershell and have confirmed that it does work.

The ps outputs a listing of all employees that fall under a manager. I would like to use this listing as a filter and it must be dynamic. I would like to see the ps run daily and update the filter which would then push software with a policy.

Is this possible? Am I doing this all wrong and there is a better way? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

Altiris is pretty much computer-centric. So it is always difficult trying to do deployment in a user-centric way. However you can make it work if that is the easiest way for you to work.

I had once the challenge as well when I receive a user list to which I should deploy a certain software. I ended up creating a workflow where I could upload a list of user names and the workflow created a computer list for me.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/downloads/users-computer-report-workflow

In your case I would do the same thing. You start off with your powershell script selecting the users in a certain department. Using the users you go and select the computers for each user (you probably could use the privous mentioned workflow) and add those computers to a filter. You can then run the worklow on a schedule updating your department-filters.

The filters you can then use in the Altiris console to assign to your software policies.

If you do not have workflow in place you could do the same thing using script / programming with ASDK.

Hope this helps.

Stefan

AGVictor,

You can use the Active Directory Import tool to import the desired users.

Navigate to Actions->Discover->Import Active Directory.

Create a new User import rule. Make sure that you select the checkbox for "Match computers with primary users."

If you have AD groups that correspond to each department, you can select those as the items to import. If not, you may want to select the AD OU containing all user accounts. Be sure that you've included the department field in your column mappings. That is what will associate the users (and their departments) to their computers (based on the primary user data that is collected by Altiris inventory).

The filters that are created as a result of your AD import are located here: Manage -> Filters - Notification Server Filters -> Directory Filters. If you have imported departmental groups from AD, you can use these filters as-is. If you've imported your users (and included their department information in your column mappings), you'll have to build out your own filters for each department using the imported user/department data.

I hope this points you in the right direction! I'm sure that the AD Import is well-documented. 

Good luck!