Greetings Everyone

Welcome to another Wednesday featured forum, today we will be looking at the System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) Forum.

What is SCCM?

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is a Windows product that enables administrators to manage the deployment and security of devices and applications across an enterprise. SCCM is part of the Microsoft System Center 2012 / R2 systems management suite

This is an exciting and interesting forum, why? Because you can automate things in your environment and remove the manual process in certain areas. What can it do for me you might ask?

Firstly, we not going to dive into the installation and configuration of SCCM but to be able to manage your environment you will need to have an Configuration Management Agent installed on each Server that is part of a group in the correct boundry. The next step would be to define the AV policies as well as others in SCCM to be able to make use of this automation.

Let's take a look at some of the areas that can assist in the daily/Weekly or monthly tasks of IT Administrators:

• Windows Defender Definition updates (Some organizations lock down Internet access on all servers, how would you get your machines to update there AV each day, well with a Automatic Deployment Rule you can have your SCCM server download the updates at X number of intervals per day and deploy it to your Servers/Workstations, keeping them up-to-date.
• Windows updates (Windows updates make use of the bits technology but imagine 20 000 machines going to download updates that can be more than 400mb, it will surely kill your WAN link, now you can control what gets installed as well as tie it in with your scheduled maintenance tasks like server reboots etc.)
• Application deployment (This i think is a big win, imagine having to setup 10 or more machines and install the same software and each one might have a different config, well with SCCM you can have all this done automatically for you)
• Operating System Deployment (Most machines today have PXE, instead of having a windows USB or disk lying around or a pirated version installed, now you can control the install with the custom image for the hardware in your environment and have a machine up in no time for a user, including all drivers, patches and applications)

That is a high level overview of some of the things you can do with SCCM, a very awesome product to have in your environment.

System Center Configuration Manager has progressed over the years, let's take a brief look at the versions that have been out there:

Version History:

• 1994 - SMS 1.0
• SMS 2.0
• 2003 - SMS 2003
• 2007 - SCCM 2007
• 2012 - SCCM 2012
• 2015 - SCCM 1511
• 2016 - SCCM 1606 and higher.

Let's take a brief look at the Technet Forums available for SCCM, this Forum has over 40k+ pages of questions, a rather big one I would say, if you want to check out the forums head over to this link.

Some examples of questions asked:

• SCCM 2012: failed to connect to distribution point
• Network Drivers
• Failed to download the update from internet. Error = 12007

Please continue to support these forums and add your contributions, together we can grow this and other Forums out there.

If you are interested in studying this, head over to the following links:

• Microsoft Virtual Academy
• CBT Nuggets
• Partners in your area that offer training.

That is all for now folks.

All the Best!

Edward