App Portal / App Broker and SCCM Deployments

[melinda_atkeisso]

Two questions for App Broker / App Portal and how it works with SCCM:

1. Does App Broker / App Portal create the deployment or does the SCCM Admin do this when they package the application?
1. If it creates the “deployment”, does it create a deployment for each machine or is the same one used over & over?
2. Does App Broker / App Portal kick off the application deployment cycle?
1. If not, how else does the application get kicked off? Per the customer, this relates to Applications in SCCM, not Packages.

[CharlesW · Accepted solution]

Melinda,

When you create a new "software" catalog item, or change the "package" under the deployment settings for a catalog item, then App Broker will automatically create both a collection and a deployment for you.. A collection/deployment will be created for both the install, and (optionally) the uninstall. Note that you will see information about the deployments being created in the CreateESDObjects.log file, and also in the ESDWebService.log file, which is created on the Config Mgr server in the ESD Web Service logs folder. The same collection/deployment is used by all devices..

When a request is submitted for the catalog item, App Broker will create a direct membership rule for the device on the collection. If you have collection cleanup enabled, then App Broker will remove the direct membership rule once the installation completes. Once a device is "inserted" into a collection, then App Broker will initiate a machine policy refresh for the target machine..

Either App Broker will directly connect to the target machine using a WMI call, or it will tell Config Mgr to perform the policy refresh. Either way, this essentially tells the target to "wake up" and check for any new advertisements. If found, then this will initiate the install on the target machine. This approach should be the same for Applications, packages, and task sequences.

Note: While rarely used, there is a way to attach an existing collection/deployment to a catalog item.. This can be only be done using one of the following three function calls in the the web service integration.asmx. There is no way to link to an existing deployment through the admin UI:

AttachConfigMgrApplicationDeployment()

AttachConfigMgrPackageDeployment()

AttachConfigMgrTaskSequenceDeployment()

Hope this helps.

Charles

[CharlesW]

P.S. Sorry for the formatting of my post :).. Not sure what happened, but all of my line breaks were stripped out.

[melinda_atkeisso]

Thank you very much!!!