System Center

Top five features in System Center Configuration Manager 2012

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By Colin Smith

August 25, 2011, 8:00 AM PDT

Takeaway: Colin Smith describes five of his favorite new features in Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012. You can try these out by downloading the prebuilt Hyper-V VM of the Beta 2 release.

Earlier this month Microsoft released System Center Configuration Manager 2012 RC to TAP customers. A Release Candidate (RC) is feature complete code that has the potential to be the final RTM code unless any unexpected bugs emerge. This means that we are getting close to a final product.

I’ve worked with SMS and SCCM since 1994 and since Beta 2 was released at MMS in March, I’ve been getting familiar with SCCM 2012. Microsoft has made it extremely easy to get your feet wet by providing the download of SCCM 2012 Beta 2 in a prebuilt Hyper-V virtual machine. There is a lot of great new functionality in the new version but I will limit myself to what, in my opinion, are the top five new features.

#1 User-centric management

One of the big themes in SCCM 2012 is User Centric Management. This theme is carried forward throughout the product. Software distributions can now be targeted at users rather than just at devices. Think about a call center or a security desk, where multiple users share the same hardware. Previously when targeting a software distribution, SCCM limited you to collections based on systems but now software distributions can be directed at specific users or groups of users. Additionally, users can define a primary device (or you can set up rules to determine a primary device) and have a different software policy for primary and non-primary devices. Consider the scenario where a manager logs onto a subordinates workstation temporarily, if the system is not designated as his primary device, any applications specifically targeted at managers primary devices, will not be available to him on that system.

#2 Configuration settings remediation

Desired Configuration Monitoring has been available since SMS 2003 and was renamed to Desired Configuration Management and enhanced in SCCM 2007. The ability to report and alert on compliance has been useful in monitoring and managing configuration drift. SCCM 2012 takes the concept of managing configuration drift to the next level. First of all, the feature is now called Configuration Settings and can be applied to desktops, servers, mobile devices and users (see point one above). My favourite new functionality is the ability to remediate WMI, registry, and script settings that are not compliant. Automated remediation can drastically

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