SCCM Operational Collections: 52 Ready-Made Examples

Rather than manually building common operational collections one at a time in the SCCM console, it’s worth defining a standard set once and creating them consistently — whether by hand, via a PowerShell script you maintain yourself, or through the ConfigMgr PowerShell module’s New-CMDeviceCollection cmdlet.

A Useful Starting Set

A well-rounded baseline of operational collections typically covers active/inactive clients, clients grouped by build or update level, hardware categories (laptops by manufacturer, servers by OS version, physical vs virtual), and reporting gaps (systems not reporting hardware inventory recently, clients without the console installed, mobile devices by platform). Examples include:

• All Clients Active / All Clients Inactive
• All Clients Not Reporting HW Since 14 Days
• All Laptops (and per-manufacturer: HP, Lenovo, Dell)
• All Servers Physical / All Servers Virtual
• All Workstations by OS version (Windows 10, Windows 11, etc.)
• All Systems Created Since 24h / All Systems Disabled / All Systems Obsolete
• Mobile Devices by platform (Android, iOS, iPadOS)

Building each of these as a WQL-based query collection (rather than manual membership) keeps them self-maintaining as your fleet changes. If you maintain your own PowerShell wrapper around New-CMDeviceCollection and Add-CMDeviceCollectionQueryMembershipRule, you can redeploy this same standard set instantly to a new SCCM site rather than rebuilding it by hand.

Still Current on Configuration Manager 2603 (Updated for 2026)

New-CMDeviceCollection and Add-CMDeviceCollectionQueryMembershipRule remain the correct, unchanged cmdlets on the current Configuration Manager release (2603), so a PowerShell wrapper built around this baseline set today will still work unmodified if you’re standing up a new site later. The one addition worth building in for 2026 fleets: an ARM64 (Windows-on-Arm) collection alongside the manufacturer-specific laptop ones, since Arm-based Windows 11 devices are common enough now that most standard operational baselines should account for them separately from x64.

Resources

• 52 SCCM Powershell Collections