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MMS 2009: information about Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.Next

In the session System Center Configuration Manager “State of the Union” Bill Anderson and Josh Pointer revealed the first looks of next version of Configuration Manager. It's called System Center Configuration Manager.next

The first thing we noticed is that the interface has changed and looks like the Operations Manager 2007 console. They actually got rid of the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). They actually mentioned "no more F5", we'll see.

In this version of SCCM also Mobile Device Manager will be integrated, offering a single pane of glass view on device management. Licensing information will be announced within 60 days. The console now uses the wunderbar, in the wunderbar you can find the following items: Administration, resources, deployment, monitoring, reporting, software updates and site hierarchy management.

Important to know is that the system requirements for SCCM.next are much higher then they were for SCCM 2007.
• 64-bit Windows for all site servers and site roles except:
o Branch distribution points
o Standard DP’s on windows 2003 machines 32-bit
• SQL server 2008 only 64-bit edition.
• SQL reporting is the only reporting service available. The “Old” reporting is gone.
• SQL replication to move objects.
• State-based DP groups. (automatically (de-)populate DP's depending on membership)
• Remote Control with CTRL-ALT-DEL.

In the demo they showed that SCCM.next has advanced role based security. This means that the user starting the SCCM console now only sees the functionality he is authorized for. This goes beyond the functionality provided by SCCM 2007 today, where everyone sees all the SCCM 2007 features in the console. You can now actually start more than one console at the same time. Pre-defined roles are already available, and can be copied to a new role which can then be modified. All of this will also be exposed via the SDK ofcourse.

The filtering is extended so you can create multiple filters, which is useful for companies who have a very large number of collections.

SCCM.next will have its own alerting mechanism. You can create alerts for example if a predefined number of clients are not compliant or if the client health is getting critical. This very confusing if you work with OpsMgr. The question is why this information is not parsed to Operations Managers instead. Different product teams i guess.. Let's hope more integration will take place.

A very cool feature is that you can update your images with the latest hotfixes with just one click. This will save administrators a lot of time in keeping images up to date. Normally you have to recreate a image to have the latest hotfixes. Now SCCM will only show the updates missing for that specific image.

It is now also possible to create an OEM media disk. This is disk is used by your hardware vendor so he can pre-stage machines with your company image when they are delivered.

The task sequences used in OS deployment are extended with USMT. It is now possible to do more settings from the GUI. Also there is support for USMT 4.0 which can now even run while in Windows PE.






SCCM.Next will also have the ability to limit the bandwidth per distribution point. It was already possible to do this between Config Manager sites but in SCCM.next it can be done per DP.

Also new is to have autodeployment rules, which can be used for example to distribute virus definition files.





SCCM.next has a couple of interesting new features which makes the product even more complete then it was. The release date for SCCM.next is unknown. First the product team will do 12 separate studies on the use of Configuration Manager, they will benchmark and validate the features now know for SCCM.Next so we don't expect it to release soon. If everything shown in the demo’s will be in SCCM.next it will be worthwhile to wait.

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