It’s been just over a week since the official announcement that service pack 1 for System Center Configuration Manager 2012 was released. This is a really important release for the System Center teams as SP1 really drives home the idea of unified device management. Service Pack 1 adds support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8, Windows 8 tablet plus added support for Mac OS X, Linux and Unix platforms. This is exciting for our environment because there has always been a gap with managing the subset of machines running Mac OS X or Linux. Can you manage one of these platforms to the level that you can manage the Windows platform? No. However this is a step in the right direction. Admins want a single pane of glass view for managing their environment – SP1 moves System Center in the direction. Some other features of this release are support for Windows Embedded devices, full PowerShell support, Windows Azure based Distribution Points and the ability to subscribe to email alerts.
When you dig a little deeper into the CM 2012 release you’ll find added support for user profile and data management with their new User Environment Virtualization product (MDOP 2012) and real time administrative tasks for endpoint protection, network cost support for application delivery, updates to Bitlocker including TPM and PIN, and the ability to deploy Windows 8 applications.
