How does SoftwareCentral work?
This guide describes the collection structure SoftwareCentral uses.
When a user deploys a program, orders a program in the shop, imports or reinstalls a computer, SoftwareCentral will add the device or user to a collection using a Direct Membership Rule. (SoftwareCentral can be configured to use AD deployments instead. However the described collection structures in this chapter is still required.)
As you cannot select which collection you want to use in SoftwareCentral, you have to have a collection structure which allows SoftwareCentral to figure out where to put the users and devices.
If your collection structure differ from the structures described in this guide, SoftwareCentral will be unable to find the correct install and uninstall collections.
Packages consists of programs. These programs have names. From the Settings menu in SoftwareCentral you have defined the names of install and uninstall programs.
If you have different program names for your packages, see the guide “Custom Program Names”.
When a package is deployed to a device, SoftwareCentral looks at where the install program is deployed. SoftwareCentral will then add the device to the collection the program is advertised to and the package will be installed.
The same goes when a package is uninstalled.
For SoftwareCentral to work properly, a packages programs can only be deployed to one collection each, preferably as required.
Applications are a bit more intelligent than packages. When an application is deployed to a collection, it is flagged as either and install or uninstall deployment.
When an application is deployed to a device, SoftwareCentral finds the deployment flagged as the install deployment and adds the device to the device collection the deployment points to.
When an application is deployed to a user, SoftwareCentral finds the user install deployment which points to a user collection. The user is then added to this collection.
For SoftwareCentral to work properly, an application can only be deployed one time to an install / uninstall user / device collection - 4 collections in total.
If you have more than the 4 collections described above, see the chapter “Custom Collection Structures” in this guide.
When a computer is imported or reinstalled, it gets added to an OSD collection where a Task Sequence is deployed to. It is possible to deploy Task Sequences to multiple collections, as SoftwareCentral displays the OSD collections instead of the actual Task Sequences.
So unlike packages and applications, operating systems are displayed as collections. To simplify the language in SoftwareCentral, OSD collections are simply mentioned as “Operating Systems”.
This is not supported by SoftwareCentral, as SoftwareCentral depends on a 1-1 relation between deployments and collections.
If you have deployed multiple applications or packages to a single collection, SoftwareCentral will read this collection as the install collection for all the packages and applications deployed to it.
This means, that if you deploy an application, deployed to a collection, with multiple other deployments, all the applications deployed to that collection will be installed together with the originally selected application.
Furthermore, the status messages returned to SoftwareCentral will be wrong, as it cannot figure out which deployment is the correct deployment to get the status message from.