The latest news comes from TechEd 2010 in Berlin these days. During this week several sessions during this week will cover System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012. Beta1 of SCCM .vNext was released earlier this year and is now officially re branded to SCCM 2012. The system after for more than 10 years central in the way of distributing applications, the “twenty twelve” release will be User Centric.
Some hightlights of SCCM 2012 are:
- The infrastructure is flattened, if I am right you are able to have one Central Administration Site (1st-tier), one level of Primary sites (2nd-tier) and one level of secondary sites (3th tier)
- One primary site can hold up to 400.000 clients
- There is no need to create a primary site per “administrative site”, SCCM 2012 now has Role Based Administration.
- With Role Based Administration, you can assign rights for users or groups that belong for instance to a particular sub-net
- Forefront Endpoint Protection will fully integrate with SCCM 2012, you only need one console to manage your clients
- Desired Configuration manager has now auto remediation
- New for the user is, the Software Catalog portal or the Software Center on the workplace
- With the Software Catalog portal you can easily search for new software and install or request the software on your computer
- You can define relations regarding applications, from one application like Office 2010, a corporate user will receive the MSI installation and a user with it’s own computer will receive the App-v version of Office 2010. The user won’t know the difference, except for the deployment speed.
- The migration path from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012 is “easy”, all the migrated applications will be “legacy apps”
- For applications created with SCCM 2012 you have “optional apps” and “required apps”
- You can manage the SCCM Client settings centrally per collection
- You can now throttle or schedule Distribution Point replication without creating an extra site
- SCCM 2012 can you branch cache to minimize the load on the WAN
- Microsoft Updates can be deployed to groups or individual systems
In the next couple of months we will dig deeper into the new System Center Configuration Manager