ConfigMgr 2007 Driver Management Revisited (Again)

After MMS 2010, I had posted a series of blog postings talking about different mechanisms for managing drivers with ConfigMgr 2007.  You can read through that at http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2010/04/29/configmgr-2007-driver-management-the-novel-part-1.aspx.

Then a hotfix was released that changed the way ConfigMgr 2007 handled duplicate drivers when importing.  I talked about that in the post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2010/10/15/configmgr-driver-management-a-new-development.aspx.  One point called out in that posting:  driver categories would be overwritten when a duplicate driver was imported specifying a different category.  That made the “Added Predictability” model described in the first posting very difficult to implement (without using something like the PowerShell script I posted in the first series).

Now, there is a new development:  Another hotfix that affects driver importing:

Category is incorrectly overwritten when you import the same driver on to a System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 site server
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2513499

From the title, you can probably guess what it fixes:  Now, when importing duplicate drivers, if you specify a different category, it will be added to the list of categories instead of overwriting the list that is already there.  As a result, the “Added Predictability” model is fairly simple to implement (without the need for scripting).  Look at this basic scenario:

• Download all the drivers for a Dell Latitude E6410 and import those, specifying a category of “Latitude E6410”.
• Download all the drivers for a Dell Latitude E6510 and import those, specifying a category of “Latitude E6510”.

Without the hotfix, all the common drivers would end up with a category of “Latitude E6510”.  With the hotfix, they would have both categories specified.