Admin Arsenal Blog

Dynamic Collections are an extremely simple, yet powerful, tool that can be used to breakdown your environment into logical groupings. For instance, you can have a Collection that specifies that all member computers must have Symantec Antivirus installed, or must have at least 2 GB of RAM.

There are two tools within Admin Arsenal that you can use to help you be more effective with your Collections. The first is the Export / Import command.

Export / Import allows you to either share or receive Collections that have been previously defined, perhaps by another Administrator. If you have defined a great Collection go ahead and export it and offer it to other AA Administrators. This can save duplication of effort plus you can look like a bad ass.

To export a Collection (or a Collection Folder) go to Admin Arsenal, right click on a Collection and select Export...

An XML file will be created. You or any other AA Administrator can take that XML file and import it into another AA console.

In a nutshell, the Export command allows you to save or share the collection DEFINITION. If you want to export or extract the Collection data (such as member computers, etc.), then you will need to use a different command altogether.

With a Collection highlighted, simply go to your Computer menu and select Save Computers As...

Enter the name of your file and hit Save. You can now import this data into Excel or Lotus 123 or another reporting tool.

It's important to know which of your computers don't have the latest Windows Service Packs. I'm going to show you a quick way to find this out using the inventory in Admin Arsenal.

Our goal is to create a collection for each operating system, and then roll them up into one collection folder which will give a birds-eye view of all the missing service packs. In the end, you should have collections that look like this:

The first step is to create a collection folder. Once you have the folder, right click on it and select Any Children under Collection Folder Rollup. This will show all of the computers that appear in any of the child collections we create.

Below this collection folder, create a dynamic collection for each operating system. Each collection will need two filters, one for the operating system and one for the service pack. For example, the XP collection looks like:

Once you're done, all you need to do is select the top folder to see all of your computers which are out of date. Collections are "live" in that when computers get re-scanned, the members of the collection will be updated automatically.

You can tweak any of the collections to meet your needs. You may have, for example, some computers which cannot or should not be updated. You could then add filters to the appropriate collections to keep them from showing up.

To save you time, I've exported the collections used in in the example (out-of-date-service-packs.xml) Import them and use them to your heart's content.

In Admin Arsenal, collection folders are handy to keep your collections organized, especially when you start to get a lot of collections to keep track of. What you may not realize is that folders can also hold computers. This is accomplished by Collection Folder Rollup.

Rollup refers to the ability of folders to look at each collection inside of them, combine all of the computers in each, and roll them up into a single list. This is especially useful when the criteria for your collections is hierarchical in nature. Consider the following example:

This hierarchy works great if you want to quickly see which computers are servers, or only the servers with Windows 2008. To get the computers to flow up into the folders, you need to set the Collection Folder Rollup property of each folder. This is done by right clicking on the folder.

You have three choices for rollup.

1. No Children - Don't do any roll up, the folder contains no computers.
2. All Children - Include any computers which are in all of the child collections. A computer must show up in every collection to be in the folder.
3. Any Children - Include computers if they appear in any child collection. This is the choice that we want for the example above.

Once you have your collection folders rolling up computers, you can use them everywhere you would use a static or dynamic collection.

1. From your main Admin Arsenal window select New Dynamic Collection from the Container menu.
2. Give the collection name something useful such as: "Systems WITHOUT SAV".
3. Change the match operator to “Not Any”.
4. In the main filter body change the first filter to “Software Name” and use the operator “contains”. In the field following “contains” type in: "Symantec Antivirus".
5. Save and close your new collections window.