Introduction

Microsoft have released another version of Configuration Manager (Technical Preview), this time it’s version 2202. It’s got a list of new features detailed here.

One of those new features is the ability to delete a bunch of collections referenced from a collection when you are deleting said collection.

Confused ? 😛

Let’s give it a try

In this example I’ve created a few collections with limiting collections of the parent and then populated them with some members.

I right clicked on the root collection and selected the option to Delete from the options available.

This gave me the following Delete collection error message, which in a way might be confusing as it hides what you CAN do later.

To find out more about the new feature, click on Details. That gives you a breakdown of the collection structure and how they are related.

If you click on View Relationships, you get to see a graphical view of that flow.

The View Relationships graphic will change quite a bit depending on what type of membership rules you’ve configured, eg Limiting, Include, Exclude and so on. Below is an example of a pretty complex relationship.

If at this point you are happy to delete all these collections go ahead and close this screen and then select Delete all listed collections from the previous wizard.

You will get a list of objects about to deleted, along with a question asking if you are sure that you want to delete them, you can optionally select to delete the devices within the collections also by selecting Delete each collection member from the database.

If you select OK then the action is fairly immediate and deletion starts and ends quickly.

and after it’s done…there are no items found !

cool or what !