New task came up recently – I need to separate in SCCM self-managed workstations from IT-managed ones. We define following criteria for IT-managed workstations: no other accounts are in local Administrators group except for built-in Administrator, Domain Admins group and a group for Service Desk administrators. All workstations are located in the same OU, so I cannot use OU-based collections.

As you may know, SCCM 2012 doesn’t have built-in tools to get local groups membership. Thanks to Sherry Kissinger who solved this problem for us using Compliance Settings. After you install her package, you’ll get a new Configuration Baseline and Configuration Item in SCCM console named as “WMI Framework For Local Groups with Logging” and “Local Group Members into WMI with Logging”. This package also creates 2 new tables and 1 view into SCCM database: LocalGroupMembers_DATA, LocalGroupMembers_HIST and v_GS_LocalGroupMembers0.

After creating and deploying baseline, you can use v_GS_LocalGroupMembers0 view to create reports based on local groups membership.
Don’t forget: you must not deploy that baseline to domain controllers! For example, you can create a collection which includes all your systems except domain controllers: create new device collection using All Systems as limiting collection and add it with include rule, then add All Domain Controllers collection with exclude rule. You can download MOF-file for such collection here.

Unfortunately, neither LocalGroupMembers_DATA, nor v_GS_LocalGroupMembers0 can be used in WQL-queries when you create a collection.
Am I stuck? Let’s review what do I had for now:

• I have all data about local groups membership in custom table.
• I can create any reports using that data.
• I can create collections using data from standard tables in SCCM DB.
• But I cannot create collections based on a data from custom SQL-tables.

I need a way to put data from table LocalGroupMembers_DATA into standard SCCM tables and PowerShell is here to save the day.
There are at least two ways to get data from SQL with PowerShell:

1. Connect to DB directly and use T-SQL queries with SQL cmdlets.
2. Connect to SQL Server Reporting Services using New-WebServiceProxy cmdlet. Stefan Stranger and Jin Chen wrote an example script to achieve it.

With PowerShell we can do anything with that SQL-data. Our goal is to populate device collections with workstations and here we go again with two different options:

1. We can add computers into group in AD DS and then create a device collection using this group. For this method to work you need to activate Active Directory Group Discovery discovery method for site and domain where AD group will reside.
2. Add computers into collection directly using Add-CMDeviceCollectionDirectMembershipRule cmdlet.

Since both group and a report will be useful for me in the future, I’m stick with them.

Now our scenario looks like this:

1. Activate Active Directory Group Discovery.
2. Collect local group membership using Compliance Settings.
3. Create a report with gathered data an any SSRS.
4. Get names of computers from this report with New-WebServiceProxy cmdlet.
5. Add these computers into an AD group.
6. Create a device collection by that AD group.

I build a report where I list all computers don’t comply with conditions discussed earlier.
Here is what first DataSet query looks like:

It can be easily expanded to include another set of groups to ignore.
Mind CompOU parameter: in web-interface you can select multiple OUs where to search computers.
To get a full list of OUs from a forest, you can use another query:

I modified RenderSQLReportFromPosh.v1.000.ps1 so it could populate AD DS group in addition to get data from reports. Here’s its code:

My modified script receives a report from $URL and $ReportPath locations, compares a list from it with members of $GroupName AD DS group and adds/removes computers from that group until it and the report would be the same.
You can find a path for log of actions in $Log variable. Here, script records all computers which were added or removed from the group.
OUs to search are defined into $param1 and $param2 variables. If you need more OUs, create a new parameter variables and do not forget to add them into $parameters.

As last, I created standard device collection based on AD group $GroupName.

You can download report as an RDL-file and a script here. Do not forget to create DataSource in the report to connect to your SSRS instance.