Systems Management

all,

i'm trying to understand mif files and how they can help me with my deployments. my understanding is essentially they register a success or failure and allow a custom description?

if that's correct what i'm tyring to do is add machines to a software deployment collection. these machines have had the software previously manually installed, and the admins now want these machines managed via sms. i don't want the software to be reinstalled on these machines.

what i've done to acheive this is write a vbscript which is its own sms program that checks for the existence of a particular directory on the machine associated with the software. if it finds this dir it copies a mif file to the local machine which has a failure value and a description, the script then exits with an error code of 1. if it doesn't find the dir, it copies nothing, and exits with an error code of 0.

the point of this is so staff can review reports on the deployment, particularly failures, and realise the advertisements failed due to a previous manual installation and nothing sinister.

the script is functioning correctly in terms of the rest of the sms program execution order actually doesn't go ahead if the script exits with 1. but the issue is the sms logs are reporting that it doesn't find a mif file associated with the program. i've tried having the script copy the mif file to %systemroot% and %systemroot%\temp with no results. i have made sure that my sms package's product field, publisher field and filename match those of the mif file itself.

so my first question is: is my understanding of mif files correct? secondly: why is sms not finding the mif file? thirdly: is there any easier way to handle this?

thanks in advance,

daniel.