Reconciliation/Differentiation not working as documented

First registration of device may reconcile to another with one shared reconciliation attribute even with Differentiation checked.

This is fixed in version 11.3 - see KB 7014213 "ZENworks Configuration Management 11.3 - update information and list of fixes", which can be found athttps://support.microfocus.com/kb/doc.php?id=7014213

How it was fixed:

If differentiation is disabled:

• The first device with matching value for ANY of the selected device attributes is the candidate for reconciliation.
• The attributes are tried in the following order: serial number, mac address and machine name.
• An attribute is used to query devices from DB only if it is selected.  
• If devices with matching value are found for a selected attribute, other attributes are not used.
• Preference is given to device with matching serial number if it has matching values for the other selected attributes.

If differentiation is enabled:

• The first device with matching values for ALL selected device attributes is the candidate for reconciliation.
• The candidate is selected strictly according to the selected attributes and there is nopreference for any attribute."
  
  

The 11.2.x implementation returns the first device which had matching value for any of the selected attributes.

The attributes were tried in the order: serial number, mac address and machine name.

If multiple devices are found to have a matching value for any of the selected attributes, then:

• If differentiation was disabled, the first device returned by the DB query would get used for reconciliation. The selected attributes would not get verified.
• If differentiation was enabled, the devices were sorted based on matching attributes: GUID, serial number, mac address and machine name. The device with the maximum attribute score would get used for reconciliation.

But this does not guarantee that all the attributes selected by the administrator were used to select the device for reconciliation.