An accounting firm, Numbers R Us, wants you to distribute Microsoft Excel to its 50,000 accountants across the world. You can distribute the software the old fashioned way by having the systems administrators install Excel on their machines in their respective domains, or you can take advantage of Microsoft's Systems Management Server (SMS) to automate the software distribution process.
With SMS, you can inventory software and hardware configurations, distribute software, perform remote troubleshooting, store information in a centralized database, and customize and integrate SMS with your internal processes. Management Information Format (MIF) files collect inventory information for equipment and personnel for SMS. (This article assumes you are familiar with MIF customization. For the necessary background, see Mark Eddins, "Customizing Systems Management Servers," January 1997, and Mark Eddins, "Customizing Graphics for SMS Custom Inventory Objects," March 1997. Also see Mark Cooper, "Maintaining Oracle SmartClient Workstations with SMS," page 183.)
Microsoft extended SMS's functionality considerably when it included the MIF Form Generator. With the MIF Form Generator, you can create, with no programming, custom forms called MIF Entry Forms. With these forms, you can collect additional inventory attributes that SMS's standard inventory doesn't provide. For example, you can prompt SMS client users to provide information, such as names or phone numbers.
Screen 1, page 176, contains an example of a MIF Entry Form. After a user completes the form, the client puts the information in a NOIDMIF file. (A NOIDMIF file lets you add or update MIF groups in the Personal Computer SMS architecture--MIF architecture tells SMS what data is necessary for a MIF component, such as an Employee component. For more information on architecture and other MIF details, see the sidebar "The MIF: SMS's Workhorse," page 177.) The client then saves the file locally in sms_clientroot\ms\sms\noidmif. During the next inventory collection, SMS's Inventory Agent reads the NOIDMIF and combines it with the standard inventory for later processing into the SMS database.
The MIF Form Generator lets you create forms that query users for all kinds of information. For example, you can create a MIF Entry Form to ask employees their birth date for a calendar on the company's intranet. Or you can ask employees to identify the minor but annoying problems they've been encountering with their computers so that you can get an idea of the types of problems occurring.
However, the MIF Entry Form isn't an effective tool for gathering the information you need to distribute Excel and subsequent upgrades to the 50,000 accountants at Numbers R Us, for two reasons. First, some people will fill out the form incorrectly (even if you give them explicit instructions), and others won't fill out the form at all (they might be on sick leave or vacation). Even if 95 percent of the users complete the form correctly, 2500 users will not receive their software package because their machine won't appear in the SMS query results. And with 47,500 machines in the SMS query results, you'll never discover who is missing.
Second, once SMS saves the information in the MIF Entry Forms, it doesn't prompt employees to update their information. Thus, if an employee moves to another department, changes title, or leaves the company, the SMS database won't reflect this change. Therefore, some Excel upgrades will never reach the correct people.
So if you cannot use MIF Entry Forms to collect the needed information for the SMS database, what can you use? Most companies set up and regularly update a human resources (HR) database that contains information on all employees. If you integrate the HR and SMS databases, you can get complete, accurate information.
Here's the game plan: Instead of extracting information from employees, you will extract the data from the Numbers R Us HR database and process it into a MIF for each employee. You will then place the MIF in the sms\site.srv\isvmif.box and let SMS process the MIF, integrating the new data into the SMS database.
One strategy to implement this plan is to write an IDMIF with a custom Employee architecture. (IDMIFs let you create new or update existing MIF architectures.) Then you can relate the employee attributes to the SMS personal computer attributes by writing queries that incorporate the Employee architecture and the Personal Computer architecture. Although this implementation strategy seems feasible, it is not desirable because SMS offers no way to query more than one architecture at a time. A better strategy is to use the existing Personal Computer architecture and the corresponding Identification group from the SMS database to generate a custom IDMIF for adding the user information. (An Identification group contains attributes that identify the component--e.g., Employee--that the MIF describes.)
The HR and SMS Integration Strategy
Here's an overview of the integration strategy that uses custom IDMIFs. First, you need to match a machine record in the SMS database to the employee record in the HR database. To make this match, you need a unique employee attribute that both the SMS database and HR database reference.
At Numbers R Us, each employee has a unique ID number. Employees' ID numbers are already in the HR database, but not in the SMS database. To add them to the SMS database, you can use the MIF Form Generator to create a MIF Entry Form that prompts the user to enter only his or her employee ID number. This form will generate a NOIDMIF at the client workstation and put the employee ID attribute in a new group, which you can call User Information. SMS will automatically take the resulting MIF containing the new information and incorporate it into the Personal Computer inventory. The resulting record in the SMS database will have the employee ID attribute, which you can match to the employee ID attribute in the HR database.
How to integrate SMS with an existing external database
Because you are entering only a single attribute and pulling the rest from the HR database, the potential data entry problems with the MIF Entry Form discussed earlier are not an issue. The application will flag any employee ID mismatches so that you can identify inaccurate or missing ID numbers, and the information will be up to date because the HR database is up to date.
You now have an SMS database of Personal Computer inventory records that include a custom group called User Information, which contains the employee ID attribute. Therefore, you can look up the employee ID for each record in the HR database and find the associated SMS Personal Computer inventory record. Once you have the matching record, you can extract the Identification group from the SMS record and use it to build the Identification group in the custom IDMIF. To finish, you need to fill in the employee information attributes. Figure 1 provides an overview of this strategy.
How to Build the Database
You now know the game plan and strategy. Here are five steps to implement them.
STEP 1:
Collect each employee's ID number. Use the MIF Form Generator to create a MIF Entry Form that collects one data value, the employee's ID number. SMS will collect this value when it inventories the workstation through the NOIDMIF process. When you install SMS, you install the MIF Form Generator. An icon will appear in the Systems Management Server group on your SMS Site Server. The MIF Form Generator is intuitive to use. If you review the documentation, you will likely have no problem creating this simple form.
STEP 2:
Develop an integration application that queries the SMS database views that the SMSVIEW program creates. The program will create your custom IDMIF to incorporate the HR attributes into the SMS database. The program needs to extract the Identification group information for each Personal Computer inventory record. You can use Visual Basic (VB), Visual C++, or your favorite development tool to develop this program. Let's call this application HRINT for easy reference.
STEP 3:
Match employee ID numbers in the HR and SMS databases. For each inventory record retrieved in Step 2, have HRINT query the HR database for a record with the matching employee ID number. If HRINT doesn't find a match, it will write an error in the error log, which you need to investigate. Using the information you collect from the SMS inventory database and the HR database, HRINT will create a custom IDMIF that includes the Identification group information from the SMS inventory record. The architecture for the IDMIF is Personal Computer. HRINT will add an Employee Information group that contains all the desired personnel attributes from the HR record to the IDMIF.
STEP 4:
Save the IDMIF. Have HRINT save each completed IDMIF with the name empl_id.mif (where empl_id is the employee's ID number) and place it in the \SMS\SITE.SRV\ISVMIF.BOX subdirectory on the SMS Site Server.
STEP 5:
Update the Personal Computer inventory. SMS's Inventory Processor will automatically process the IDMIFs and update the Personal Computer inventory so that the inventory includes the Employee Information group and the new attributes from the HR database.
Piece of cake, right? Not quite. If the client workstation runs MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, or Windows NT, the IDMIF will work. You can query the updated SMS database to get the information you need to distribute the Excel program to the intended 50,000 users. And because you regularly update the SMS database, you can use it to send future upgrades as well.
But if the client workstation runs Macintosh or OS/2, the inventory records will suddenly start showing null values for all groups except the Identification and Employee Information groups. And after a while, the inventory records will start showing null values for the Employee Information groups, but display values for all the other groups. To find out why, you have to examine how SMS collects and stores data.
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