SMP Console Notification is a bell icon
Article ID: 150863
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
With the release of ITMS 8.1 RU3 a new "notification" feature has been introduced as documented in the 8.1 RU3 Release Notes under "What's new in this release":
Notification in case of changes to the IT Management Suite GA Product Listing.
If the IT Management Suite GA Product Listing changes, the bell icon appears in the top right corner of the Symantec Management Console page.
You can postpone the notification for selected period of time. Postponing works per account, so if a user logged on with one account postpones the update, then the user who logs on to the console with another account will still see the notification.
Note: This notification is informational only. Actual update of product is performed in SIM.
As an IT admin, you need more awareness of the Release Updates Symantec/Broadcom is releasing for ITMS, so you can have improved visibility of incremental value and fixes delivered for the products you own to plan quicker upgrades to the latest version.
Environment
ITMS 8.1 RU3 and later
Resolution
Implementation details
The SMP Console shows a notification in the main header area when NS determines that the product list file, used by Symantec Installation Manager (SIM), was updated. Usually this is a GA Product Listing (PL) file on www.solutionsam.com (the central location where customers download Altiris information from). If there are several PL files registered in SIM all these files are checked, not just the active one.
The SMP Server does a check with a standard Daily schedule (by default at 2:10 AM each day). To do that it runs SIM with a command line in silent mode. SIM only determines whether the PL file modification date was changed, it does not download PL files and does not determine whether the files were really modified.
Note: SMP Console notification is triggered when it detects that a new PL version is available and not just when there are updates for currently installed products. It is a notification about PL refresh availability.
In common cases, with the release of a new PL when there are updates for products, you will see them in SIM also. But if the PL was released to fix some problems in SIM itself or some particular products, for example, you will get a notification in the SMP Console, but when SIM launches it will show nothing after the PL is updated and refreshed.
The SMP Console queries the SMP server for the results of that check every five minutes asynchronously and if there are PL file modifications detected then the bell icon is displayed in the header area as shown below:
You can click on that bell icon and see what the alert is for. In the case of product updates, you will see the corresponding message similar to the following:
Product updates available in SIM
The notification can be postponed for a day, week, or month. Postponing works per account, so if a user is logged on with one account and they postpone the update, then the same user logs on with another account they will still see the notification.
The update notification is not actionable but is a notification only. To see which products were updated and/or to start a product update you'll need to open SIM and this will download the updated product list files and display all the information.
Update notifications can be configured to be visible only to certain users of the console. The View Update Notifications privilege lets you configure if the update notification icon is displayed in the Symantec Management Console. Note that you cannot disable this privilege for the default Symantec Administrators role.
Additional Information
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