Application Management in sccm 2012

Applications management became an integral part of System Centre 2012 Configuration Manager.
As days goes by we get new applications added and old once need to go. But what is the best practice managing all the apps environment. Well, System Centre 2012 Configuration Manager accommodate some of these tasks by introducing Supersedence and Retire functions.
Supersedence and Retire features doesn’t affect already installed applications.

Supersedence:
Application management in Microsoft System Centre 2012 Configuration Manager allows you to upgrade or replace existing applications by using a supersedence relationship. When you supersede an application, you can specify a new deployment type to replace the deployment type of the superseded application and also configure whether to upgrade or uninstall the superseded application before the superseding application is installed.

When you supersede an application, this applies to all future deployments and Application Catalogue requests. This will not affect the existing installations of the application.

When to use Supersedence?:
Application supersedence is very useful when upgrading from one version to the next version. This is very useful specially deploying a custom configuration files for some applications in MSI format.
SCCM 2012 provides ability to uninstall all the older version and install newer/latest version.

Supersedence relationship can be viewed in the console.

Retire:
When an application marked as Retire, it is no longer available for deployment but the application and any deployments of the application are not deleted. Existing copies of this application that were installed on client computers will not be removed. If an application that has no deployments is retired, it will be deleted from the Configuration Manager console after 60 days. However, any installed copies of the application are not removed.
Before retire an application
1.    Delete all the active deployments
2.    Remove contents from all the distribution points
3.    Rename (if possible) with Retired suffix or prefix

When to use Retire?:
When an application is no longer required but don’t want to delete it yet because of it may need for some unknown reason