Microsoft TechEd North America & Configuration Manager

Just a bit of a sum up of the announcements that were made around ConfigMgr 2012 at TechEd North America. I’m not there myself, so this is just what I found in the community and what I think about these…

• Microsoft announced availability of ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 CTP at the end of this week

That would be great, I always like to test new stuff :-)

• Windows 8 support

I stopped trying to get it done with the current version, it’s just not working (problems with sysprep). This way I’d finally get to really play with Windows 8 and ConfigMgr. Looking forward to it!

• Linux and UNIX support

I never installed a Linux/UNIX machine (except for XenServer), so this is no biggy for me, although I can imagine lots of customers asking for this, as many still deploy infrastructure like DHCP/DNS on Linux machines. Now they can manage them aswell.

• Mac OS X support (with Endpoint Protection!)

Same goes for Mac, I’m no Mac guy, but since BYOD is growing fast I guess this is also quite important to some enterprises.

• still nothing about ConfigMgr 2012 and Powershell

Whyyyyyy???? I honestly don’t know and understand why they still don’t come up with their own cmdlets. Most of the other System Center products got them. Or am I really the only one who wants to automate stuff in Configuration Manager?

[UPDATE] They just now announced Powershell support!!! **FINALLY!!!

• I’m looking forward to see how they did it.

• adding a Central Administration Site (CAS) into an existing environment

Now this I find huge! Up until now you had to decide whether you deploy a CAS or not right at the very first moment of you building your environment. It now seems as if this isn’t the case anymore after SP1. Although I have to admit that there are not that many scenarios for deploying a CAS, those that come along after you deployed your stuff without the CAS make life hard.

[Update]

More info available on Kent Agerlund’s blog: http://blog.coretech.dk/kea/configmgr-2012-sp1-announced-teched-2012/