A collection is a customized management view of the resources in your organization. In some ways, collections are similar to machine groups and site groups in previous versions of SMS. However, collections are much more flexible and useful. They gather resources according to criteria that you define, using membership rules, which enables you to create an organized structure that logically represents the kinds of tasks you want to perform. For example, you can create collections for various client and resource groups such as Finance and Human Resources, Atlanta and Tallahassee, or even Pentiums and 486s. Collections also serve as targets for performing SMS operations on multiple resources at one time (such as software distribution).
In the SMS Administrator console, Collections contains the collections defined for the current site. The details pane displays the subcollections and the resources contained in the selected collection.
Related Topics
How SMS Works with Collections
How Collections are Replicated to Child Sites
About Collection and Resource Security
Using Collections to Manage Resources Overview