System Center Guide

Desired Configuration Management (DCM) is a feature in System Center Configuration Manager. With DCM, utilize Microsoft and third party best practice configuration knowledge to improve configuration definition and maintenance. Find the software you need to define configurations for your Microsoft and third party applications with Configuration Manager 2007.

At time of posting, there are 31 Configuration Packs available for download from the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Configuration Pack Catalog on Microsoft’s website.

Just got this from Rob Olson at DudeWorks. Check it out at http://www.dudeworks.com/

We are very excited to release InventoryManager 2007. 
Finally the ability to extend and manage inventory on demand is here!

Take control of your inventory today!

Extend asset inventory in SCCM 2007 and SMS2003 and unlock a whole new world of possibilities.

Inventory Manager replaces the manual editing of text-based MOF files with an front end easy-to-use GUI that is integrated with the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and the SMS 2003 console. Inventory Manager allows administrators to easily add, edit and remove inventory rules for hardware and software within Configuration Manager. Using Inventory Manager, administrators can also view and change properties and reporting attributes of built-in inventory rules, as well as create new rules for WMI values and registry keys using simple WMI and registry wizards. Inventory Manager provides a rule based management solution which takes all the guess-work out of asset inventory and speeds the process of defining and managing inventory items to a few minutes rather than several hours or days.

“We believe this is a solution that customers have long awaited. Until now, it has been a difficult and frustrating task to manage and extend inventory, and this new solution is a huge improvement for administrators to tackle asset management,”  – Rob Olson, President
On Demand Asset Inventory Solution
• Customize and extend inventory data
• Inventory Registry Keys
• Inventory WMI classes
• Manage default inventory rules
• Enable and disable reporting of rules
• Granular properties management
• Backup and Recovery
• Simple to use wizards
• Built-in Registry and WMI browsers
• Integrated directly with WMI
• No MOF programming
• Automatically manages all MOF files
• Create new rules in seconds
• Supports Configuration Manager 2007
• Supports SMS2003

Over the weekend the product group approved and released the System Center Configuration Manager VHD. This evaluation package will allow you to fully test the product in a virtualized environment with a virtualization product that supports the VHD format. Please see the link for more details.

System Center Configuration Manager 2007 VHD