What’s new in Configuration Manager 1708 Technical Preview

Today Technical Preview 1708 was released! Great new stuff as always. The Configuration Manager team release 15 releases of Configuration Manager in a year, 3 Current branch releases and 12 Technical Preview releases! That is simply amazing!!  The Configuration Manager product team is doing an amazing job and the products capabilities goes beyond my wildest dreams!

How would have thought we would be where we are today when SMS 2003 was released??

What is new in the Configuration Manager technical preview?

Software Center customization’s using Client Settings including Company Logo!

No requirement for an Intune Subscription any more to modify the Company logo and colors in Software Center! Great Stuff!

It is also possible to configure which of the tabs in Software Center that should be shown, this is great. There is some confusion today about what the compliance tab in Software Center actually shows compliance for, so there is a use case right there!

The logo file must fulfill the following size rules to work.

As displayed here the Compliance Tab is no longer visible in Software Center

Reboot a computer using Client Notification!

Right-click tools are slowly being replaced by built-in features in the Configuration Manager console, this time around the possibility to reboot a client using Client Notification. Note that the command to reboot is only visible when you select a single computer and for collections only after you select Show Members in the Collections so that the collection is added devices node as  “sticky” node.

If a user is logged on the Reboot settings for the client are honored and the reboot dialog is displayed.

Run Script on devices or a collection of devices with the possibility to pass optional parameters to the script.

The Run Script feature is truly a great addition making it possible to create and run Powershell scripts in the console on devices and collections of devices. I am sure we will see more and more improvements in this feature in the future. This time the possibility to use Optional parameters to the scripts are added.

Management Insight

I have nothing showing up in my Management Insight but I guess that more insight will be shared on this new feature when the official docs are live!

“Gain valuable insights into the current state of your environment based on analysis of data in the site database.”

I am sure there are more hidden gems in this release, I will update this post if and when I find them!