Configuraiton Manager Beta 2 has been out a few months by now. Most of you have already seen or performed a testdrive of the beta 2 version. Next public relelase will be the release candidat. Some of the changes you can expect to see is described below. As the product is still in beta, all information in this post is subject to change and NO, I do not know anything about a release date.

Setup

  • Improved multi-lingual support, during setup you will be prompted for additional languages you wish to install. Those are languages for the console and also for the clients.
  • Secondary site added content routing giving you are better control of the route being used when deploying content to secondary sites.
  • SQL Configuration Options har changed, you now can specify Ports and Instance names
  • MP Replica support addedjust like in CM07

Console Changes

  • Administration Workspace and Assets and Compliance workspace switches place.
  • Searching via dates, x number of days
  • Reports will be grouped as in CM07
  • Role Based Administration for reports. Example, Application administrators will only see reports that are available for the Application administrator.
  • You can use BROWSE when adding users – WOW, no more NT 4.0 Smiley But not only can you browse, you can also verify that the account works in your environment. For client push you can connect to admin$ on a host pc in your environment while you are adding the account – so cool!

Application catalog & Software Center

  • Application catalog now allows you to modify the color scheme.
  • Software Center, UI changes filter – drop down like in CM07
  • Show/hide optional deployment
  • Update Catalog tables on a schedule

Monitoring

  • Mail subscriptions on Alerts

Discovery

  • Computer discovery introduces Stale computer filtering. You can filter system that are not active in Active Direcotry based on password change and/or lasted logons.
  • IP subnets becomes IP address ranges.
  • AD forest discovery will create IP ranges instead of IPsubnets.
  • System Group Discovery is removed. (OU, Nested group is now part of AD system discovery)
  • Security group discovery is renamed to Group Discovery
  • Delta discovery will find group changes even on existing objects. Removal from a group will also be part of the discovery process.
  • Domain functional level must be Windows 2003 or higher

Client Settings

  • Client agent settings can be imported/exported

Settings Management

  • Baseline remediation’s can now be limited to maintenance windows.
  • Baselines can generate OpsMgr. Alerts
  • Create dynamic collection from baseline compliance

Client Health

  • Check now checks for 21 settings.
  • Automatic remediation can be turned off in registry on the client
  • Client health state is now real time data

Remote control

  • Disabled by default
  • Remote control viewer shortcut in the ConfigMgr. program group
  • Added support for Windows 7 SP1 etc.