Community Evaluation Program, a personal recap

The last 1,5 years the Configuration Manager 2012 Community Evaluation Program guided numerous of people with the evaluation of the early beta and release candidate versions of Configuration Manager 2012. Yesterday the CEP for Configuration Manager 2012 stopped after almost 2 years. A little personal recap.

At TechEd 2010 in Berlin I attended a Configuration Manager 2007 R3 session from Jeff Wettlaufer, at that point still at Microsoft. He pointed out the Community Evaluation Program that was just started and still open for application.

Joining the program gave me the opportunity learn about the early beta version of Configuration Manager 2012, which was not released for the public yet, and share the information with the rest of the Configuration Manager community via this blog. Subjects came across about the new application model, the new features in Software Updates Deployment, role based administration, compliance and settings management and the new console, all presented by the Configuration Manager product team. During the first run of the program I won a MMS ticket for the March 2011 edition in Las Vegas. In Vegas I was able to learn again lots about Configuration Manager 2012  and it was the place where Configuration Manager 2012 Beta2 was released for the public. At the same time Sybex contacted me if I would like to write chapters for Mastering System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, how cool was that. 🙂 Also met a lot of great people in Vegas.

The second run of the Community Evaluation Program was based on the beta2 version of Configuration Manager 2012 and later the Release Candidate 1 and 2. Playing and testing with the beta 2 and release candidate versions in combination with the CEP sessions and support from the Community were very valuable to be able learn the inside out of this new version of Configuration Manager. As being part of the CEP and blogging I also was able to find the bigger Configuration Manager community online and locally.

My highlights of the CMCEP were:

  • To be able to attend the Microsoft Management Summit in 2011 and 2012
  • The Configuration Manager 2012 Package Conversion Manager  🙂
  • Configuration Manager 2012 in general!
  • Attending the biweekly sessions to hear about the features first hand.

The Community around the Evaluation Program stays alive, the connect site and the forums will be managed and if one of the beta versions of the Service Pack 1 of Configuration Manager 2012 will come to life the CEP will be active again.

Leaves me a huge thanks to the CEP team (Nicole, AJ, Jeff) and the Configuration Manager 2012 product team (all of you!) for sharing their knowledge about Configuration Manager and creating and maintaining the Community Evaluation Program. It was a blast, and I can’t wait until the beta of SP1 will be released 😉 See ya in Vegas!

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