Do you have machines in your environment that you simply want to gather inventory data from but want to ensure that no deployments touch those machines? Well you can almost get there (see important notes at the bottom of this post).
When you are creating a schedule for a Maintenance Window on a Collection in SCCM you likely have noticed the smallest window you can create is 5 minutes. Now that’s a pretty small window however its still enough for a deployment to sneak in if the machine is inadvertently targeted.
SOLUTION:
Its pretty simple actually. Create a new Maintenance Window that’s in the past with the Recurrence schedule set to None.
For Example:
Create a new Collection to use for your maintenance window
Click the Maintenance Windows tab, and click the star to create a new schedule
Set the date to some time before now, set “Configure the recurrence schedule” to None, and ensure that the Apply To is set to All Deployments.
When you click OK you will receive the following prompt confirming that no recurrence will mean no future deployments.
And you now effectively have a “Zero Hour Maintenance Window”.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
As with all maintenance windows, if a device is a member of another collection that has an available maintenance window, the deployment could still run. Maintenance Windows are aggregated for a device to determine when its open and when its closed.
An SCCM admin could override this maintenance windows restriction when creating a new deployment so a good solid policy of not overriding unless you understand the full impact of devices is always the best policy.
