Microsoft's Systems Management Server

I need to learn this dangerous and silly program for work. So I will keep a log of what I learn here.

Overview
This software was designed so that it could be massively scaled, meaning many sub-networks over a very large geographic region (possibly the entire planet or even orbitting computers, logical adjacency is more important than physical adjacency here).

But our system is small compared to what I need to know about this program, so I'm going to focus on Security Team topics such as deploying patches.

Vocabulary
I need to keep track of all the various terms introduced in this software.

site - this is the logical network of computers that the paricular setup of SMS manages

collections - a group of computers that are grouped by some common attribute (such as 'Room 37 computers', 'tablets', 'computers with bagel crumbs in the keyboard')

package - a combination of software and rules for installation of the software. A package is something like OneNote and the set of rules that installs OneNote to particular machines. To install a patch or a software suite to a machine or many machines you have to make a package of the software first.

advertisement - information and notification to a collection of machines to run and install a package or set of packages. In order to deploy a package you must advertise the package to a collection of computers.