Here at MMS 2001 day 1, I have had the pleasure of attending two great SCUP 2011 session. From my test drive I have made my personal top list of new and improved features.

1. Performance

a. The application has undergone a major improvement when it comes to performance. Where it could take 10-15 minutes to load some of the larger catalogs in SCUP 4.5 the same process today takes less than a minute.

 

2. New UI

a. The admin UI has moved away from the MMC (big applause) and is now built to look like the other System Center products.

 

3. New Authoring experience

a. Authoring updates is so much easier and also introduces some new features like adding a list of required updates to your update.

b. You can control which update(s) are being superseded.

c. The applicability rules are also much easier to create and modify. You have the same looks and feels as with the DCM feature in ConfigMgr.

 

4. Rules

a. We can create “global” rules that can be used in multiple updates. You can use the rules as templates, once added to an update you can always modify the rule. You add a Saved rule in the same way as any other applicability rule.

 

5. Publications

a. Publication is a new feature allowing you to group your updates into logical groups. Each group can be independently published no need to publish all updates as in version 4.5.

 

6. Import catalogs

a. The way we import catalogs has changed. We are not forced to select between a single cab file or a bulk import. All subscribed catalogs are listed, and can be multi selected.

 

7. Compatibility

a. Finally the schema hasn’t changed which allows us to reuse the existing all previous updates. There is no direct update path, updates must be exported from SCUP 4.5 and can imported directly into SCUP 2011.

b. Certificates can be reused thus eliminating the need to redistribute anything to existing endpoints.