Date Conflict For Many Optional Applications In Software Center changes to 4/10/1998

There was interesting issue with ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CU3 client. Many Optional applications in Software Center changes to 4/10/1998 for ‘Available After’

This issue was posted on several forums but there is not solution yet why is this happening.

After working with Microsoft, found the root cause but no permanent solution, instead we have temporary workaround to fix this issue.

Issue:

Applications appear as Old date (1998) in Software Center for ‘Available After’ which is unclear to end users about the application availability and they tend to ignore it.

During the Deployment Microsoft office project professional 2007 application, the available after date shows as 4/10/1998.Why is this?

 And when we deployed the test project professional application, it show correct date .why?

This is not application issue nor is client issue nor Server issue then where the problem,

Basic Troubleshooting:

Ø  The first thing that comes in mind is, check the Scheduled date for the Deployment, what date it is specified? You are wrong. The scheduled date is correct but it will not display here.

Ø  2nd is to look at wmi, application information is stored in “root\ccm\clientsdk” namespace.Startdate for the specific application show wrong Date.

Ø  3rd to look is, run the policy spy and check the properties for the problem package using the application assignment ID,you will see correct date which was scheduled in application deployment but why is this showing as 1998 on client machine?

Ø  4th to look at all the logs (especially policyagent.log, DCMagent.log, ccmstatestore.log) but they don’t reveal much information.

After doing lot of troubleshooting on the client, found the issue is causing because of Task Sequence .Confused?

Root Cause:

Applications which are deployed to clients are also part of Task Sequence as referenced packages, the two deployments causing the clients to go back to old Date.

More explanation:

Assume Task sequence (TS1) which is used to deploy OS is targeted to Collection (coll1) as Optional (not mandatory).This task sequence has many actions for applications For Ex: MS project professional (app1)

So the clients which are part of Collection coll1 (considering the cm12 client is installed) will have information about App1 which used in the Task sequence (TS1).

I also created deployment for App1 and targeted to MS office project collection (coll2) with available option (not required).

So far, No confusions. One TS to coll1 and one application (App1) to coll2.

After the deployment is done, if you look at the software center, if it will show wrong date (1998), then client is not synced correctly and this is happening because of 2 deployments, one from Task Sequence and other from Application Deployment.

To confirm this tested by creating few deployments for the applications used in Task sequence and deployed to test collection (for the clients who are part of TS), i see the same behavior.

Workaround: Do not use the same application which is referenced in Task sequence for the application deployment. Recreate the application used in Task sequence and deploy to clients that will show the right information for ‘available after’.