SCCM - State of the Union - Mat's view

As Colin said, the presenters were great - the best of the event so far!

They started off with a run down of the top 10 codenames they came up with before Configuration Manager v.Next. As it is now focused on User Centric Client Management, UCCM was a candidate, before they considered what would happen if the Forefront brand was added (say it out loud), and then even worse, 'Enterprise' at the end. It got a good laugh and bought the audience in.

In the last 3 months Asset Intelligence has grown 30%, they are learning the gaps and adapting. They encouraged us to use MS Asset and Planning toolkit.

As Colin mentioned they have worked with Adobe to ensure product updates are being rolled into SCCM/SCUP - this is a user feedback driven product enhancement. They talked about a partner product Shavlik Scupdate which does many more 3rd party products and integrates with SCCM. (I have used this in a previous job with Windows Software Update Services and it is a good product)

They talked about some of the stats they have gathered from those customers that enrolled in the feedback service and then showed the changes they have made based on that knowledge.
They also use forums both external to MS as well as technet. The top issues commonly are down to admins not reading the documents or superflows or fail to fully configure the products. Good to see RTFM is still key advice!

Over the next 12 months -
Configuration Manager Information Experience team will be writing more superflow, as well as a web based help module.

v.Next will be able to deploy apps not just to end users but also to Citrix XenApp, this would allow a scenario where the full application is deployed to a users primary machine, but when they roam - they get their app via Citrix. A great solution for some key users.

SCCM R3 - more power management and reporting, scales to 300k machines, oem media will work better, MDM licensing will be rolled in.

Lots of research has been done with customers and their end users. From this they have developed the v.Next marketing, all around 3 pillars - Empower, Unify and Control. I'll define these more in another post.

Their research from end users was useful but not often in the way expected. An example given was that if a generic notification popped up asking the user to take an action, they would generally ignore it, if it had the company logo, people would do what it said, even if the text was to format their pc! It will be interesting to see what middle ground they get to ;-)

v.Next is currently being piloted within MS IT on beta 1 with 50k machines. The TAP (Technical Access program) has 14 other customers, 6 have more than 100k machines, 7 more than 10 primary sites, 6 more than 100 secondary sites, 8 more than 100 distribution points (DPs) so pretty big/complex environments.

They then did 3 demos of things that may or may not make it into the final product and got the audience to vote. I actually think all 3 should be in, but wont list them here just in case.

Key things to prepare for v.Next:

1. Flatten your hierarchy
2. Use AD sites and services for site boundaries
3. Break up collections that contain users/computers
4. Use Branche Cache
5. UNC paths for source content
6. Use App CI - will help with state based apps and detection methods.
7. Use DCM