About the status of Managed Software Delivery policies

The information in the Software Catalog lets Software Management Solution report the status of Managed Software Delivery policies with greater accuracy than other methods.

When a Managed Software Delivery policy completes an action on a client computer, it performs a compliance check to evaluate the success of the execution. The compliance check uses the software resource's unique identifier to determine whether that software is installed on a client computer. For Windows software, you can define a detection rule that contains additional information about the software and makes the detection process even more accurate. After the compliance check, the Managed Software Delivery policy reports the status information to Notification Server.

See About policy applicability, compliance, and remediation.

This method of determining a policy's success is more accurate than using the package's exit code. A package can return an exit code that indicates success when in fact, the delivery was completed but the installation was not successful.

For example, you can use a Package Delivery task to install an MSI package that contains a custom action. However, because the custom action is placed in the wrong section of the MSI, it is not installed on a Windows Vista computer. Even though the package is not installed, the package execution is reported as successful because the exit code is returned. If you use a Managed Software Delivery policy instead, the compliance check can determine that the package is not installed. Therefore, you get an accurate report of the delivery status.

See Sources of status information in Software Management Solution

See About the execution of Managed Software Delivery policies