Resuming Software Management Framework activities and allowing other solution policies to execute on a computer pending a restart or a logoff

Products

• Software Management Solution

Issue/Introduction

Software Management Solution provides the Results-based actions settings that let you define the actions that occur during or after a Managed Software Delivery policy runs on the client computer.

For more information, see the help topic Results-based actions settings in Software Management Solution.

These settings include the option Allow user to defer action that lets you choose not to force the automated restart while the user is logged into the computer. If a Managed Software Delivery policy installs several software resources and the user defers a computer restart that is required to complete the installation of a software resource, this deferral postpones the installation of the other software resources in the queue.

However, prior to Software Management Solution 8.1 RU2, such a computer restart deferral also causes the following behavior:

• Other Software Management Framework activities are blocked on the computer.
• The old managed or legacy software delivery policies or quick delivery tasks that are set to run daily on the computer stop running.
• No new managed or legacy software delivery policies or quick delivery tasks can be applied to the computer.
  This behavior can block the activities of other solutions. For example, Patch Management Windows System Assessment Scan policy is implemented as a legacy software delivery policy. Thus Patch Management Solution cannot run the system assessment scan on the computer to determine the required software updates, etc.

Resolution

Software Management Solution 8.1 RU2 introduces the functionality to resume Software Management Framework activities and allow other software delivery policies and tasks to execute on a computer pending a restart or a logoff that a Managed Software Delivery policy requires. This functionality is not available out of the box. You can enable it manually on the required client computer by creating the following non-default registry key value:

"DWORD: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Altiris\Altiris Agent\SMFAgent\Delivery\Options\DisregardPostRunAction" = 1

When the value DisregardPostRunAction is absent or equals zero, the functionality is disabled.

Limitations

Before you use this functionality, consider the following:

• If a software resource requires a computer restart to complete the installation, the installation of other software resources can fail.
  The installation of the software resources that fail to install is not rescheduled if their software delivery policy has no repeat schedule.
• If you use multiple restart settings for multiple Managed Software Delivery policies in the Results-based actions section or tab, the lowest specified time value is used for the countdown or for the restart deferral time in the notification dialog box.