Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Organize Collections with Drag and Drop

One of the plans we've had since I took over the administration of Configuration Manager is to organize the objects in the admin console.  SCCM makes it easier than SMS since it supports drag and drop.  The catch is that it only supports it with certain types of objects.  Collections is one of the object types that doesn't support drag and drop.  The only way I found to reorganize collection objects was to make a link of a collection to a second collection.  Making this link actually makes a 2nd instance of the collection appear in the hierarchy.  Then you can go back and safely delete the original collection.  The other option is to use a Microsoft provided SMS tool called CollTree.  Yes, the program does work with SCCM.  After downloading the SMS 2003 SDK you can compile the executable from \Program Files\Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 SDK V3\Samples\VB\CollTree\CollTree.vbp  It's not as great as if Microsoft had built this functionality into the Admin Console, but at least it works!  Download a compiled version of CollTree here: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/bleary/attachment/68439.ashx

Credits to Brian Leary for pointing out this useful tool: http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/bleary/archive/2006/12/01/colltree-drag-and-drop-collections-for-sms-2003.aspx

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