I posted a while back on this but I have a production version done now. This utility is really handy for creating groups that you can tie to SMS Collections as query rules. The company that I am at now has all of their departments broken down into “Entities” and we create separate groups and collections for each package for each Entity. It can be very time consuming to create all of the groups and collections whenever we have a new package to send out.
So I wrote a HTA that automates the entire process.
First, you select the “Entities” that you want to setup and type in the base groupname name that you want to create. Then, you click “CreateGroups” and it will create all of the groups for you. In my current customer's case, each groupname is prepended with their Entity code. And the groups are created in each entity's specific OU. And it is really fast.
Next, enter the base collection name and click “CreateCollections”. It will create unique collections for each entity (also prepending the entity code before the base collection name). Every entity has their own collection structure and the utility will put the new collection in the collection heirarchy where it belongs. This seems to take a few seconds per collection but there is a lot of stuff that has to be done to create a collection, tie it to a parent collection, setup a refresh schedule, and create the query rule.
It might take a little bit of customization to get it to work for your SMS environment but it is mostly XML driven so you can just create an XML file with the information that is pertinent to your SMS setup.
Anyway, here's a screenshot. Sorry for the slow download speed on this webserver!
If you have any feedback, please shoot me an e-mail: matt.broadstock@gmail.com