Desired Configuration Management (DCM) is a technology to check if systems are compliant to the exact configuration-, security, software- or patch requirements that are defined by the organization global policies. It also gives you the capability to check if illegal or non-approved software is installed. All of these compliance rules are set in a ‘baseline’ that can be assigned to a group of systems which is called a ‘collection’.

Within Configuration Manager you can define how often DCM should made a comparison between the baseline and the collections. If a system is not compliant you can create an automated task so the system gets compliant. In this way you can check if a registry key exists for instance to monitor if antivirus software is installed. If this is not the case you can push the antivirus software with an ‘advertisement’. With an advertisement you can distribute software with an automated script.

So DCM creates a dynamic environment where it reacts proactive on systems that are not compliant by the defined rules and so the organization policies. The default integrated reports provides a clear picture of the environment and the systems that are compliant or not. Research has proven that administrators in enterprise environments spend an average of ten thousand hours to keep their systems compliant. The same research also proved that fifty percent of the total downtime is due to misconfiguration.
DCM can extremely reduce those numbers. DCM is not totally new as it was introduced with SMS 2003 R2 but it was not fully developed yet. The main improvement with DCM in ConfigMgr is that you can assign an action to a baseline so that systems get automatically compliant.