Well here is the first post right from the MMS in Las Vegas. I just attended a session named ConfigMgr State of the Union with Bill Anderson and Josh Pointer.

The session was focusing on what happened in the past regarding ConfigMgr like the release of Service Pack 1 and the R2 add-on.
Besides the past it was of course also focusing on the future like the release of Service Pack 2 and the next version of ConfigMgr for now named ConfigMgr.Next.

Service Pack 2
So let’s first take another look at Service Pack 2. The beta is planned for release in June and the RTM is scheduled about 90 days post the RTM release of Windows 7.

The main topics the Service Pack will deliver are:

Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
P2P support for Windows 7 (Branch cache)
Support for USMT version 4.0 for Operating System Deployment
The certificate for Asset Intelligence is no longer required
Intel Active Management Technology (iAMT)
64 bit performance counters to monitor site running on a 64 bit platform with OpsMgr
Muli select and delete functions in the driver catalog

ConfigMgr.Next

In the session we saw a lot of demonstration on the next version of ConfigMgr 2007. It is currently of course still under development so no guarantees about the new stuff mentioned below.

Console
With the new version the console is completely new and no longer based on the MMC.
The console is like you have now with OpsMgr 2007 and has the following main nodes in it:

Administration
Resources (Collections, Users, Computers)
Deployment
Monitoring (Client Status, Client Health, Client Activity where you can also set SLA’s on them.)
Reporting
Software Updates
Site Hierarchy Management

Role Based Access Control
Other improvement is that security is now based on Role Based Access Control. So now more instance and class rights. You can define roles like; Security admin, OSD admin, Software advertiser etc. The roles can be copied and customized to fit your own specific needs.
Part of the role based access control are scopes. You can for instance create a scope for the deployment of a package.

Desired Configuration Management
New feature in DCM is that you can set thresholds. A threshold could be a percentage of compliancy. So or instance that compliancy must be above the 80%. If it is below that threshold it will generate an alert in the console.
Software Updates
A new improvement for Software Updates is the ability to create Auto Deployment Rules. These rules can be used to deploy updates like definition files on a regular basis.

Distribution Points
Couple of new things here as well. On a distribution point you will have the ability to specify schedules and rate limits like you have with a sender. With this you no longer need an extra site on a branch location so you have a more flatter hierarchy which is of course easier to manage.

A distribution group can now be added to a State Based Distribution Group. So you can create groups with DP’s in it. These groups can be used to update packages to an entire group at once and when a new DP is deployment you make this one a member and it will automatically receive all the applied packages.

Requirements
New things on the requirements as well. To implement ConfigMgr.next you need SQL 2008 x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64, x86 is only supported for a branch DP or a file share DP.

With R2 SQL Reporting Services was introduced which will be the only supported reporting platform for the next version of ConfigMgr.

Overall I’m very much excited about the new look, features and requirements. I hope to see more of the next version upcoming days here in Vegas. We keep in touch!