Recently I had the opportunity to attend System Center Configuration Manager training at the home of Microsoft in Seattle. The weather held out nicely from the city that apparently holds the record for the most consecutive days of rain in the US, but that didn’t matter during the daylight hours; for about 200 people the focus was on Microsoft’s latest offering in the management space, System Center Configuration Manager. Over 4 full days in 24 sessions we reviewed from a technical focus the core components of SCCM 2007.

For the sake of reducing the length of this article and to prevent my fingers from RSI from typing in System Center Configuration Manager 2007 far too many times, in this article I’m going to refer to System Center Configuration Manager 2007 as ‘SCCM 2007’.

For those who have used Microsoft’s System Management Server (SMS) in the past will know the basics of what SCCM 2007 is about. Microsoft have taken that management framework, identified where it was lacking and improved on this significantly.

For those who are new to the System Management family or who aren’t familiar with the benefits of systems management, have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/about/default.aspx where Microsoft describe the System Center family as;

System Center solutions are tuned to simplify management of the systems and applications your company already has implemented. In addition, System Center solutions interoperate with third-party management tools so you can make the most of your existing investments and build on the System Center foundation with confidence. Already used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies, System Center solutions provide the reliability, scalability, and security required to manage the most mission-critical IT systems, applications, and services.

What was most surprising about SCCM 2007 was the breadth of the product. Previously I’d identified system management as being able to image some computers, deploy applications and remote control. Microsoft have focussed on integrating so much more of their other product suite which you might traditionally put in the category of system management, into the SCCM 2007 product and then increased the capability of those components to become a really powerful business product.

Scalability is something that Microsoft have also addressed, identifying the capability of System Center Configuration Manager and the ability of System Center Configuration Manager to scale to some surprising numbers.

Microsoft also stressed the capability and scope of SCCM being capable of managing not only workstations but also playing strongly in the data centre space.

The core of SCCM 2007 revolves around Configuration Management, Software update and distribution, Asset Intelligence and inventory, Client Server Design and OS Deployment. Under the cover there is so much more to these core components than would fit into this article but I’ll focus on some of what’s new to SCCM 2007.

Software distribution now includes maintenance windows, branch office distribution and the ability to copy an existing distribution package. Improvements to software distribution over previous versions include package cache control, binary delta replication, Wake on LAN and client branding.

OS deployment in particular has some great new features. Microsoft has extended the ‘Zero Touch Installation’ idea to include an end to end imaging process based on a very thorough task sequence. Features such as dynamic deployment of drivers during the OS deployment process have also been added using a SCCM 2007 managed driver catalog.

Internet based client management has been added for SCCM 2007 to allow management of clients who don’t connect to the corporate LAN. Although of course an initial configuration is necessary for this to be set up.

Another rich feature is the Desired Configuration Manager. SCCM 2007 provides a way to define configuration baselines within environments, very handy when managing server configurations. The Desired Configuration Manager will provide the capability to identify which computers have drifted from your own defined standard configuration.

Software update management based on WSUS3 is now incorporated into SCCM 2007 and integrates strongly with OS Deployment, Desired Configuration Management, Internet based management and the upcoming Windows 2008 Network Access Protocol.

The remote control functions of SCCM 2007 has also undergone not only a facelift, but according to the developers at Microsoft, a complete rewrite. Remote control functions now also allow Full Control, View Only or No Access to be defined.

While a full feature set is important and in SCCM 2007 that set is impressive, one thing that you must keep in mind when considering SCCM 2007 or for that matter any management system, is the complexity of a full SCCM 2007 deployment. Installing the application is only the start of the process. Microsoft has a large amount of documentation on planning and deploying SCCM 2007 but it is important to be sure that internal business processes are known or an understanding of your business requirements is in place to complement the deployment.

In summary, the philosophy behind SCCM 2007 seems to be to take system management tasks currently being applied manually and to automate these to improve effectiveness of IT within any organization.