Wauw is the word that first comes to my mind when I think of the next version of Config Mgr. Today at the State of the Union session – brilliant as always – the next version of Config Mgr. was revealed to the public for the first time. The version doesn’t yet have a name (at least not a public name). So we refer to it as Config Mgr. .Next or CM .Next From the short demo I have made my own personal top 6 list of new cool features and improvements.
- Performance
- No more MMC console I repeat NO MORE MMC CONSOLE yes I wrote that with capitals
- As a result to the removed MMC console no more F5 for refresh 🙂
- Only a 64 bit version will be released.
- Software Update Management
- Creation of Auto deploy rules. Now certain updates (you decide) can be auto approved. This feature has been missed a lot by “old” WSUS administrators
- Operating System Deployment
- OEM Media image task sequence. Create and ship your image directly to your OEM
- Schedule Software updates to images offline – very cool, will reduce the number of times you need to create a new master image. You can just select the properties of your image in the console and select the updates you want to import into it
- Security
- Real role based access control
- Create Custom roles
- Create security scopes
- Reporting
- Only support for SQL Reporting Services – maybe this belongs to the performance section
- Site Systems
- Sender functionality as we know it today (working with schedules and rate limits) has been built in to site systems. So now you can control the bandwidth used to send packages to each Distribution Point. This will really force us to rethink the site hierarchy design all over again.
- Dynamic state based Distribution Point groups. If a DP is added to an existing group it will receive any packages deployed to DP’s in that group.
I want to point out, that this post is written based on my notes from the session. I haven’t explained all the features and they are off course subject to change.
