In the first week of September the ConfigMgr product team announced ConfigMgr R3. This release is delivered to introduce some new features which are also covered in the next version of ConfigMgr which is planned for the year 2011.

In this post I will discuss ConfigMgr R3 in more detail. One of the first announced new features is Power Management.

Power Management
Global warming and CO2 emissions are hot topics nowadays. Based on Gartner research; desktops and monitors take account for at least 39% of these emissions. Green IT features like Power Management with ConfigMgr R3 can reduce those numbers extremely.

Of course we do need those desktops, but only during business hours. What you see is that most users leave their computer and monitor powered on when they leave for home.

So besides emissions, companies can also save money with Power Management. Based on the Microsoft Desktop Energy Savings Calculator a company with about 5000 PC’s can save 4.3 million kW/h, 3334 tons of CO2 emission and about $420,311 per year.

With a new client agent that ConfigMgr R3 delivers we can create and set policies based on the sleep and standby modes. This gives the administrator the ability to configure peak and non-peak schedules, the ability to remediate settings when they have changed. These policies can be configured for each collection.

The first step in working with these policies is to collect the current peak and non-peak hours. A common scenario is that you see a peak during the morning around 8:30 AM, a non-peak during lunch break 12:00PM and finally much less or no activity at all after 7:00PM. The Client Agent can collect all this data which can be presented through a couple of new reports.

With this scenario you can create a policy that, for example puts desktops for example into sleep or standby modes from 7:00PM till 8:00AM.

By default ConfigMgr R3 will also deliver reports so you can report on:

Current Power Settings for a machine or group of machines
Usage statistics like AC, DC, full power, sleep and standby modes
Power savings per kWh and costs
CO2 emission savings

Performance improvements
ConfigMgr administrators sometimes face distribution challenges in specific scenarios. Scenarios like when a user changes from Active Directory OU and does not receive software for at least one day. Or when a new employee starts it takes at least one day before the user receives the required software applications.

With a couple improvements that ConfigMgr R3 delivers these distribution challenges will be solved. The first improvement is on the collections.

With ConfigMgr R3 a collection can be marked for ‘Use fast collection evaluation’. This is a separate and much faster evaluation cycle, so resulting that newly discovered and provisioned machines will appear in a collection membership much faster. Note that the fast evaluation cycle only applies to:

Initially discovered resources
Resources provisioned through OSD
Resources that scanned for initial hardware inventory
Resources that were upgraded to a higher ConfigMgr client version

The other improvement is Delta Active Directory Discovery. This improvement will help you to deploy software based on elements in Active Directory. For example deploying software based on Active Directory groups, OU’s and so on.

Those elements are picked up by ConfigMgr with the Active Directory discovery methods. These days administrators are configuring a frequent schedule like every 2 hour to pick up changes as described above. Such schedules automatically results in a heavy load on the Active Directory Global Catalog and on your ConfigMgr site server.

When an object changes in Active Directory the USNChange attribute for that object will be updated with a higher number. The Delta Active Directory discovery will only look for those USNChange records.

This feature will be available for the User, User Group, System and System Group discovery methods. By default the Delta Active Directory discovery is not enabled. Once enabled, by default it will be set to every 5 minutes, so changes in AD are picked up every 5 minutes.

Console improvements
Besides performance improvements Microsoft also delivers a couple of console improvements.

New options for selected resource(s)
When you right-click a selected resource in ConfigMgr you will have the options Add to Collection, Remove from Collection and New Collection. ‘Add to Collection’ will add the currently selected resource(s) to an existing collection. ‘Remove from Collection’ will remove the currently selected resource(s) from the current collection.
The ‘New Collection’ option adds the currently selected resource(s) to a new collection.

New option for selected collection
When a collection is selected and you right-click that collection the administrator will have a new option named ‘Add Resources’. This option will launch a dialog box as below that enables the administrator to search for resources. Using this option will create a ‘Direct Membership Rule’ for the selected Collection.

Scalability improvements
ConfigMgr R3 will also improve the scalability of ConfigMgr. With R3, Microsoft will increase support from 200.000 clients per site to 300.000 clients when using the default settings for ConfigMgr.

Prestaged-Media
This R3 release will also improve and support pre-staged media. ConfigMgr administrators were asking for a way to integrate OEM factory imaging, mainly to reduce time with their hardware deployments.
Now with R3 you can create pre-staged media from the Task Sequence Media wizard. This wizard will create a .wim file which contains the boot media and the operating system .wim file.

Requirements
In order to install ConfigMgr R3 you need ConfigMgr 2007 with Service Pack 2. Good to know is that ConfigMgr R3 also contains all the features of ConfigMgr R2. So R2 is not a requirement and sites which are already running R2 will not be affected.

Timeframe
Currently the TAP nominations are closed. Microsoft received more than 600 nominations. So ConfigMgr R3 is already very popular!

The first beta can be expected in January 2010 and the final version (RTM) is for now scheduled for Q2 2010.

Because it is still very early in the build of this release things can always change. If that happens I will let you know!