With the ITMS 8.1 RU3 release (See DOC10605), a new feature has been introduced:
Notification of Symantec Management Console users in case of changes to the IT Management Suite GA Product Listing.
Note that this notification is informational only. Actual update of product is performed in SIM. 

As an IT admin, it is needed  better awareness on Release Updates Symantec is releasing for ITMS, so we can have improved visibility of incremental value and fixes delivered for product we own to plan quicker upgrades to the latest version.

Implementation details

SMP Console shows notification in main header area when NS determines that product list file, used by Symantec Installation Manager (SIM), was updated. Usually it is GA Product Listing (PL) file on www.solutionsam.com (central location where customer download Altiris information from). If there are several PL files registered in SIM all these files are checked, not only the active one.

SMP Server does that check by standard Daily schedule (by default at 2:10 AM each day). To do that it runs SIM with command line in silent mode. SIM only determines whether the PL file modification date was changed, it does not download PL files and does not determine whether the files were really modified.

SMP Console queries the SMP server for results of that check every 5 minutes asynchronously and if PL file modifications were detected shows the bell icon in the header area.

User can click on that bell icon and see what happened. In the case of product updates user will see the corresponding message

Then notification can be postponed for a day, week or month. Postponing works per account, so if a user logged on with one account postpones the update, then the user who logs on to the console with another account will still see the notification.

Update notification is not actionable. To see which products were exactly updated and/or start a product update user have to run SIM which will download updated product list files and display all the information.

Update notification can be configured to be visible only to certain users of the console. The View Update Notifications privilege lets you configure if the update notification icon is displayed in the Symantec Management Console. Note that you cannot disable this privilege for default Symantec Administrators role.

Thanks for your feedback. Let us know if you have additional comments below. (requires login)

    © 1995-2019 Broadcom. All Rights Reserved. The term “Broadcom” refers to Broadcom Inc. and/or its subsidiaries.