After MMS 2010, I had posted a series of blog postings talking about different mechanisms for managing drivers with ConfigMgr 2007. You can read through that at http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2010/04/29/configmgr-2007-driver-management-the-nov... .
Then a hotfix was released that changed the way ConfigMgr 2007 handled duplicate drivers when importing. I talked about that in the post at http://blogs.technet.com/b/mniehaus/archive/2010/10/15/configmgr-driver-management-a-new-develo... . One point called out in that posting: driver categories would be overwritten when a duplicate driver was imported specifying a different category. That made the “Added Predictability” model described in the first posting very difficult to implement (without using something like the PowerShell script I posted in the first series).
Now, there is a new development: Another hotfix that affects driver importing:
From the title, you can probably guess what it fixes: Now, when importing duplicate drivers, if you specify a different category, it will be added to the list of categories instead of overwriting the list that is already there. As a result, the “Added Predictability” model is fairly simple to implement (without the need for scripting). Look at this basic scenario:
Without the hotfix, all the common drivers would end up with a category of “Latitude E6510”. With the hotfix, they would have both categories specified.