SMS helps you group resources in collections so that you can manage your SMS site easily. Collections are necessary for software distribution — you must specify a collection when you create an advertisement, and then SMS advertises the program to clients in the collection.
Note Advertising programs to 16-bit clients using collections that are based on user groups and user accounts is not supported in this release. However, you can do this for 32-bit clients.
When you select a target collection that contains one or more query-based membership rules, those queries are evaluated at each site. For this reason, query-based collections are useful for guaranteeing that the advertised program is targeted to all computers that meet the criteria. On the other hand, query-based collections are not appropriate for situations that require a greater degree of control. For example, if you have a limited number of licenses for a particular software application, you would not want to use query-based collections to distribute that software. Instead, you should use a fixed collection for the advertisement target. This approach is often more appropriate for distributing to computers where the target collection is relatively static and well defined.
You create and maintain resource collections by using Collections in the SMS Administrator console.
Related Topics
Distributing Software to Clients Overview