Software Update compliance reporting in SCCM: "Not applicable"

Question

As far as I can tell, my main problem getting SW patch manager going into production accepted is that SCCM is not recognising SW software updates as applicable (not installed) for 100% of the machines. Does any one know what is the best approach to troubleshoot this problem?

I appreciate your help.

Cheers,

Rodrigo

kellytice · Accepted Answer

This would usually be dependent on the rules that are built into the packages.   Specifically:  the Prerequisite and Applicability rules, which are what a target machine will use to determine "is that update applicable to me or not?"

Almost certainly, one of those rulesets is evaluating as False for the machines you are wanting to target with those updates.

Sometimes you have to look somewhat closely at the rules to determine which one is making it come back as False.

As an example, take a look at this Prerequisite Rule:

What you'll see there is that this is a rule that is saying "in order for this update to be applicable, the target machine must be at least Windows version 5.1SP2 and it must be a workstation.   It would be very easy to miss that "workstation" condition if you just glanced at the rule.

Sometimes there will be rules in there that limit Applicability to 32-bit machines or to 64-bit machines, so it does very much matter which version that you publish.   If the rules call for a certain processor type but your target machine has a different processor type, it will come back as Not Applicable.