The MMC is technology which dates back to the point at which nobody thought about scale and sheer amount of objects like we have in products like SCCM 2007, and consequently it works really poor and limit this product manageability. Yes we shall admit that at the time of its introduction MMC was major step forward in unification of the way we perform administrative tasks, but this technology simply has reached the limits of its own capacity in terms of numbers of objects which needs to be managed in modern IT environments. Finally enough SCCM 2012 bring about total overhaul of SCCM management console and it is no longer based on MMC – hooray!
But many firms will stick to SCCM 2007 as corporate environments quite unwilling to break their well tested approach of having 1-2 year gap when it comes to new big product adoption – and this is perfectly justifiable from economical stand point (it used to be so, and to some extent still relevant). Expertise around the product is built, potential problems are well known and support & implementation workforce widely available and cheaper than it used to be during early adoption time – no one would argue with that. On the flip side – drawbacks in missed opportunities for your IT department to better serve your business and gain efficiencies – these are things which are notoriously difficult to measure in financial terms, and you may clearly see the logic behind “follow the leader strategy”.
Many times I saw SCCM admins struggling with “improved granular security / rights delegation” of SCCM 2007 – when they were trying to give somebody some limited rights but intended person didn’t not see the objects to which they seemingly have all proper access rights granted. The thing is that quite often SCCM console could be a culprit here and you need to restart it or perform console view clean up (see screenshot below) in cases if you don’t see things which you should be able to see there.
The other day while working with SCCM 2007 console I for some reason was unable to see software packages created by me immediately after their creation and aforementioned measured didn’t help me too, even the multiple restarts 🙂 It was remove/reinstall of SCCM console which solved this issue for me. So keep this in mind when you working with SCCM 2007 console.