SCCM Questions about offline clients

Question

All,
I wanted to provide some background on a project we are working on and provide some questions that hopefully someone can  help answer.
First I wanted to make note that as part of the requirements for this project we are going to have SCCM clients deployed at various locations offsite from our primary SCCM server and these SCCM clients will have only intermittent network connectivity back
to our primary SCCM server. During the times that these clients are lacking connectivity we will need the ability to do multiple manual hardware inventories of the clients with the expectation that once connectivity is resumed, ALL of the inventories taken
will report back to the primary SCCM server. Additionally, during the time that network connectivity is lacking we will need to be able to run SCCM reports regarding these clients local to the clients themselves (IE at the offsite location which won't have
network access to the primary SCCM server.)
Our proposed solution to these requirements was that we planned to provide the offsite location with a SCCM secondary site. The idea being that while network connectivity to the primary server was down the clients would continue to report their inventory
data to the secondary site and reports could still be run from the secondary site as well. Once network connectivity was resumed the secondary site would synchronize with the primary site and provide the primary site with all the missing hardware inventories.
I have since done further research and believe there are some flaws with this solution:
I am reading that secondary sites do not actually store inventory data in a local database like primary sites do.
I am reading that the “reporting services point” is not available on secondary sites, thus limiting our ability to run reports while network connectivity to the primary site is down.
With this I have a few questions:
How many inventories does the client save locally to the machine? Does it save all inventories triggered since the last communication with the server, or does it only save and transmit the last inventory that was collected prior to network communication
being restored?
If it only transmits the last inventory collected, does the idea of having a secondary site work for storing the multiple inventories that we need to collect while network connectivity to the primary server is lacking, or is it true that secondary sites
do not store inventories in a local database?
Finally, if secondary sites DO save inventories locally, but we are NOT able to install the “reporting services point,” will we be able to get around not being able to run the default SCCM reports by instead running custom SQL reports directly from the
SQL Server installed on the secondary site?
Thank you for your time,
Ryan

Answer 1

Well, this is kind of a complicated project and I am not going to lie I know we are asking to use SCCM in a way that it was not designed to be used.
Basically these clients are training machines that will be reconfigured potentially several times a day. Essentially when a program runs that reconfigures the machine it will trigger a hardware inventory. Custom information about the configuration will be
saved in custom WMI classes that we have created which will be inventoried  by SCCM. We need the ability for if the customer says "I had a problem at 9am" for us to have them run a report that tells us which configuration was in place at 9am.
Because of this requirement there may be multiple hardware inventories taken in a single day.
Most of these devices will go MANY months between having networking connectivity back to our primary site. To be honest though some of these devices will be at locations in which they may need to be managed for 15-20 years without EVER having network connectivity
back to the primary site. The idea for these cases was that the secondary site located with the clients would store the inventories and at regular intervals we will have a SQL expert manually export the SQL data to a CD from the secondary site and re-import
it to the primary site. This is how the primary site will get updated without ever having network connectivity to the secondary site.
For all of this to work it is essential that the secondary site store the inventories in a local database. I am just not clear if that is how this works or not. It is also essential we can run reports for the secondary site. I am a little more clear that
the "reporting services point" is not installable on the secondary site; however, my thought is the machine still has SQL installed and if it stores the hardware inventories locally we may still be able to use custom SSRS reports to extract the data.