Using SMS for Product Compliance

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To maintain product compliance in your organization, you must first determine if there are compliance issues by analyzing data in your organization. By using the analysis results, you can determine if there are any issues that need to be resolved.

To use the product compliance feature, you must generate product compliance data. Product compliance data is a collection of the software guidelines and standards that are set in your organization and organized and stored in a specific way. Every compliance guideline must include two key data items: compliance type and compliance level.

Compliance type A type of product guideline or standard. You can create as many compliance types as required in your organization.

Compliance level A descriptive measure of the level of product compliance with respect to a specific compliance type.

For example, your organization might set a requirement to use only the latest version of Microsoft Office. To detect compliance issues with this standard, you can define an Office Standard compliance type. For that compliance type, you might define the following compliance levels: compliant, noncompliant, and compliant with issues - requires an update. Using these definitions, you can create the following product guidelines:

  • Microsoft Office XP is compliant with the Office Standard compliance type.

  • Microsoft Office 2000 is compliant with issues - requires an update with the Office Standard compliance type.

  • Microsoft Office 97 is noncompliant with the Office Standard compliance type.

In a similar way, you can define other product guidelines to generate additional product compliance data. You can then run queries and reports that compare product compliance data against software inventory data or software metering data to determine which clients are noncompliant.

To resolve compliance issues, you can use the software distribution feature to upgrade software or to add specific updates to bring software into compliance. You might need to remove noncompliant software that cannot be updated.

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