WMUG UK Cardinal Place Meeting
User Group meeting yesterday at Cardinal Place, Microsoft’s London Office.
Wally Mead gives us the skinny on R3 for Configuration Manager 2007, now released. Not much has changed here from the presentations we saw this time last year, but good to see this product finally out the door. Also, this is the final release for the 2007 version, no SP3 is planned.
Silect are here to demo their CP Studio product. Orinoko-er Andy Sallabank dramatically wins a copy of the product after consuming his own body weight in beans in under 12 minutes, destroying Cliff Hobbs’ attempts to take the prize with his rendition of “Mammy” on the nose flute.
CP Studio looks pretty neat, but I’m not sure any of the projects we’ve delivered recently that used DCM would warrant it. DCM is a growing field, but I reckon it’ll be vNext before we start to do anything very large-scale. So for now (freebie copy aside) we’re probably stuck with Visual Studio!
Wally gives us the ConfigMgr VNext overview. The top-line features are pretty well known in the community now, but the new stuff is still pretty exciting:
· Hierarchy reduction…
· Role Based Security
· SQL Replication for metadata
· Deployment Types
· Gold Key remote control
· DP Groups – state based distribution (essentially this balances packages across all DPs in a group)
· Client Health auto remediation (hurray) auto-fix of WMI, auto reinstallation of the ConfigMgr agent, etc. etc. Looks cool. XML based checking engine, can be modified to include custom tasks…
· Mobile Device Manager integration
· OSD gets offline image servicing and boot media is now site-wide (this is very handy as your clients can join the wrong site at the moment if you don’t control the media distribution)…
Wally embraces his imaginary friend, Binker. Tragically Binker was later crushed during the User Device Affinity demo.
Inventory Classes editor replaces notepad for editing SMS_DEF.MOF. Import of MOF file supported, and browsing of WMI classes from the editor to enable custom inventory.
Custom client settings being set on a per-collection level is shaping up. The ability to set separate remote control config per-collection, and to modify inventory schedules for workstations vs servers, etc.
Client remediation no longer pings machines to see if they are alive. Now integrated with AD, checks the last time the machine logged into AD.
All-in, a good day, thanks to Cliff et al for organising it once more.
