(Originally posted 12/16/2013. Reposting for reference)

A situation developed recently where a client help desk was being hammered with calls during a rollout from users who were seeing the system tray popup notifications telling them that a new application was available from ConfigMgr.  As this behavior was not expected (end user notifications being considered very disruptive), the question became which applications were generating this prompt.  Against calls to disable ALL notifications for new software in the Client Settings policy, we instead looked for a way to quickly query ConfigMgr to find out which applications were so configured.

The setting in question of course is actually part of the application deployment on the User Experience tab:

Application Deployments which are marked as Available will have two options:

Display in Software Center and show all notifications
Display in Software Center, and only show notifications for computer restarts

Deployments marked as Required also have a third option to “Hide in Software Center and all notifications”

These settings are available in the v_ApplicationAssignment view in the ConfigMgr database, specifically in the NotifyUser and UserUIExperience columns.  Thus, with the following query we can get a quick look at the settings for existing deployments:

SELECT AssignmentName
,CollectionName
,NotifyUser
,UserUIExperience
,ApplicationName
FROM v_ApplicationAssignment
Order by UserUIExperience,NotifyUser

The NotifyUser value determines whether the user sees notifications for new applications in the system tray, and the UserUIExperience determines whether the user sees anything at all related to the application.  Thus an available deployment set to show all notifications would have a value of 1 for both, an Available or Required deployment set to only show notifications for reboots would have NotifyUser set to 0 and UserUIExperience set to 1, and a Required deployment set to hide everything would have both set to 0.

Armed with this information, one can quickly identify which application deployments are generating notifications and make the necessary modifications (either through the ConfigMgr console or programmatically).

Thanks to Paul Kaufman for calling attention to the SQL view!