Pointsec for PC: Using SCCM to Upgrade (part 3)

After reading through the first two parts of this discussion, I decided to add a third part. This time I'm going to talk about how I got the values that I plugged into my shrinking collection from part one. After all, we have no guarantee that the next version of Pointsec will use the same string and that could make life tough for us if we don't know how to do this.

First I had to remote desktop into the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) server and open up Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. From there I navigated to Databases, SMS_Site Name, Tables, dbo.SoftwareProduct. How did I know that it would be in that table? I didn't know for sure, but I had a pretty good idea. When I run resource explorer against a computer I saw a software product category and it knew what version of Pointsec was on the machine. I thought I would look for a table with a similar name and I hit pay dirt. From here I right-clicked on the table and selected 'Open Table' just to see what the entries looked like. This seemed similar to the stuff I saw in Resource Explorer. From that table I clicked on the button to show the SQL pane and ran this query:

SELECT ProductName
FROM SoftwareProduct
WHERE (ProductName LIKE '%point%')

That showed me that it was showing up in the database as "Pointsec PC". Not "Pointsec for PC", "Pointsec" or anything like that. Then I ran another query to find out what version was being kept in the database.

SELECT ProductId, CompanyName, ProductName, ProductVersion, ProductLanguage
FROM SoftwareProduct
WHERE (ProductName LIKE '%Pointsec PC%')

That was how I knew that the version string that I wanted to look for was "Version 6.3.1 HFA4." If I hadn't gone looking through the database like this, I might have searched for something similar but not correct, such as "6.3.1 HFA4" without the word 'version' in it.

Armed with this new information you should be able to create shrinking collections for the next version of Pointsec to come out, or any other software that you want to manage this way. Hope it helps.