We are a big fan of testing things out before trying them on the enterprise. Currently we use custom sites to test all fixlets including analysis and tasks before moving them to our production site, however I cannot figure out a way to do this for new properties. Does anyone know how to accomplish this? Is there a way to create a new property and restrict it to your test site? We have only been able to do this with two totally separate environments so far.
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If you use the Tools | Retrieved Properties function to Add New retrieved properties, they are evaluated by ALL ENDPOINTS. You can put them into Categories, but I’m not aware of any way to restrict the machines that will evaluate them.
Most of the items you see in that list of Properties actually come from various Analyses.
If you want to restrict the machines that evaluate a set of Properties, the best (only?) place to put them is in an Analysis, where you can use a Relevance clause (and Site Membership) to restrict the machines that spend cycles evaluating the content.
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My thoughts exactly:
I have only ever put properties in analyses, and I have never created a new retrieved property. I’m not exactly clear on what the difference is or why you would need to make it a retrieved property specifically.
From what I can tell they are always evaluated by all clients and always go in the Master Action Site. For these reasons it is probably best to use them sparingly. I believe it is best to put as little in the Master Action Site as possible.
Thanks Tim, I believe we will need to make that our standard policy and restrict adding retrieved properties.
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Properties are made available globally for targeting (so you can see them in those lists in the Take Action dialog) and do reside in the Master actionsite
Analyses are different as they can be activated globally or by an NMO so they aren’t as generally useful for the targeting aspect. Only an “activation” for the Analysis is placed into the actionsite in question.
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So that suggests to me that the only reason to create a retrieved property is so that it is available globally for targeting and appears in the UI in particular places. (take action, webreports, sua, etc…)
Unless there is a need that requires the property to be available that way, then an analysis should be sufficient. A globally activated analysis in a site in which all clients subscribe to with a relevance of TRUE would have a similar scope as a property created directly in the master action site.
But, as an example, you also have the option of creating a windows only analysis with windows only properties which will somewhat lighten the load on non-windows clients.