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During today’s keynote the announcement we all were waiting for was made – System Center Configuration Manager 2012 Beta 2 available for download now!

Beta 2 is also feature-complete which means that all features which will ship in the finished product are now in there. I can’t wait to start playing with it. I encourage everyone to download it and start testing it so you can start thinking about the possibilities and challenges your organization or customers will have when moving to Configuration Manager 2012. It truly is a major technology change compared to Configuration Manager 2007.

The second announcement is that System Center Configuration Manager 2012 can now manage settings on IPAD, Iphone and Android devices! One Console will rule them all.

Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 is now a part of the Core CAL. So for all of us that have purchased the Core CAL are licensed to use FEP 2010 as well which integrates in Configuration Manager 2007 today. A new version of FEP 2012 which will integrate with Configuration Manager 2012 will be released within 90 days of the release of SCCM 2012.

Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring, will give us a toolset for Bitlocker. It will ship as part of MDOP and is available in Beta today.

Windows Intune is now released, client management in the Cloud.

The Keynote was full of great demos of really cool new features in Configuration Manager 2012. The roadmap for all System Center products was announced as well. It is a great experience attending, thank you Microsoft for a great event!

SCCM 2012 will support managing Unix/Linux

During the “Configuration Manager – State of the union” breakout session which as always is a highlight at MMS, a Super-secret announcement was made that it is now official that Configuration Manager 2012 will support managing Unix/Linux.

The focus is to manage the server side of Unix/Linux not the desktop systems.
Configuration Manager 2012 will support the same platforms as Operations Manager supports today.

They are:

• Red Hat
• SUSE
• Solaris
• HP-UX, AIX

This will align System Center Configuration Manager 2012 with the support provided for Unix/Linux as in Operations Manager 2007 R2 and will fill that gap in the area of system management in the cloud.

Fantastic!

Today I had the great opportunity to attend the MMS 2011 Keynote delivered by Brad Anderson, let me tell you it was great!
Thanks Brad for a great keynote!

The clear message is that the cloud is all about the applications, quote:  “It’s all about the apps!”
The definition for cloud management was explained where System Center will fill a major role where self-service which probably is the most important part if you ask me, as it is the user experience for the service consumer.

A short summary of the highlights if the keynote and demos:

• System Center Opalis changes name to System Center Orchestrator
• System Center Project Codename “Concero” – Self-service for the cloud service consumers.
  Makes it possible to manage both services and virtual machines in the cloud in a web browser with great performance and possibilities.
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Beta
  New great interface for managing clouds and support for Xenserver
• System Center Operations Manager 2012 Beta
  New great network monitoring functionality for monitoring the services in the cloud including network problems.
• System Center Advisor – RC available today!
  System Center Advisor will provide Best Practice configuration for customer configurations through the cloud. IT will make troubleshooting so much easier through ongoing configuration assessment, so Cool!
  You can track configuration changes for instance if an admin make a change you can track it back with System Center Advisor.
  Be sure to check it out!
• Server App-V together with Virtual Machine Manager 2012 will be really powerful, making it possible to virtualize the server applications which will reduce the number of templates needed to be maintained in VMM.
• Avicode – Fantastic application performance monitoring and troubleshooting, integrating with Operations Manager 2012

I strongly recommend that you check out the keynote, when it is available I will post the link here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/cloud/videoGallery.aspx