Apple Remote Desktop 3.1 - Manual (Page 113)

Chapter 8 Administering Client Computers 113
Creating Reports
Apple Remote Desktop allows you to query client computers for many kinds of
information, from installed software to network speed and reliability. Creating reports
gives you valuable information about the client computers. Reports also help when
you’re copying files and organizing computer lists.
Collecting Report Data
There are three search strategies that Apple Remote Desktop uses when searching for
report information: new data, cached data, and Spotlight data.
With a new data search, the Remote Desktop application queries a client directly, and
waits for the client computer to respond with the desired information. A new data
search gets the most recent information, but takes longer since the client computer
has to gather all the data and send it over the network to the waiting administrator
computer. New data reports are also generated by clients whose reporting policy is set
to send data only in response to a report query.
The second kind of data search is a cached data search. With a cached data search,
the application queries Apple Remote Desktop’s internal database of collected system
information (such as hardware information and system settings), file information
(including installed applications and versions, and software names), or both.
You determine how often the data is collected, and what type of data is stored.
For more infomation about new and cached data searches, see “Setting the Client’s
Data Reporting Policy” on page 160.