Config Manager v.Next Admin UI

First up today (after the keynote) was "Config Manager v.Next Admin UI" and as you can imagine, was focussed on the improvements of the user interface, compared with previous/current versions. This will only be interesting to existing users of SCCM, new users will just expect the "wunderbar" and ribbon approach, which is delivered. The UI changes are more than just cosmetic of course - of particular note are the very fast and easy sorting and filtering options, both of which are very configurable. Tagging makes grouping very easy and is available on virtually all objects - so for example, you could tie this in with the Role Based Management, and allow site admins to only view objects, policies and devices on their own turf - for example an EU deployment manager could be configured to only see the relevent tasks, devices and functions that he required. Even if we didn't use this kind of restriction, the technology would still be useful to just to simplify views, reports and workflows for any admin working in the environment.

Speaking of reports, they showed an overview of the new graphical functionality built into v.Next - this looked very Spectrum like, and was of course dynamic, allowing you to drill down through the environment, for example down to server certificates and application issues reported by the internal alerting engine.

Also of mention was the automatic deployment statistic reporting options, which by default right out of the box show performance and failure alerting.