Deploying SCCM Applications to User Collections as “Available”
Earlier this week, I encountered what me and several colleagues thought was a fluke in SCCM 2012 application deployment — an “available” deployment to a user collection does not show in Software Center, whereas a “required” application deployment to a user collection will show in Software Center.
Turns out, the available deployment is designed to show up in Application Catalog, a feature of SCCM 2012 that my company does not use, nor have turned on.
For the majority of deployment scenarios, we deploy App-V applications to user-based collections that query from AD security groups. If you add the target user-id to the appropriate AD security group, the corresponding SCCM user collection will then reflect the change after its scheduled query update. Most of our App-V deployments are set to required for these collections, but there are a handful that we have historically advertised as available (instead of required), allowing the user to pull the App-V application on-demand at the most convenient time. This approach worked fine with SCCM 2007, and apparently would work in SCCM 2012 — assuming we used the Application Catalog.
This seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity that could be avoided by having both required and available deployments display in Software Center. But for now, we have to adjust our deployment strategy since we have no plans to utilize Application Catalog.
