Today started without a keynote instead I headed to my first session on Desired Configuration Management VS Hardware Inventory. The session was presented by a fellow MVP, Sherry Kissinger aka the “MOF master”. She did a great job revealing the power of DCM. The presentation went thru some very good examples where DCM can replace the normal hardware inventory. Some of the benefits of using DCM are:

• You can create a simple CI and run it against a collection. With hardware inventory you have to make the changes globally in the sms_def.mof file.
• DCM only returns True or False which often is what we are looking for.
• We can run the checks often for testing purposes like every 15 minute – which is not something you want to do with hardware inventory :-)
• Hardware inventory is limited to query for information in WMI or HKLM where DCM can do the same plus HKCU, VB scripts, SQL scripts, file and folder permissions and much more.

ConfigMgr vNext

One of the most awesome parts of this week, has been the “hands on labs” and self-paced lab. For the first time we have been allowed to play around with most of the features in vNext. Public beta will be available for download in May this year. I really encourage all of you to download the beta and start working with the product. You can expect to see some major changes in:

• The Admin UI – forget most of what you know today. The Admin UI has been changed completely and now looks like the other system center products.
• The entire Application feature has been changed. We can now create much more complex installations that allow you to tailor-made the installation to end-users. This feature will be described in much more details once the public beta is available.
• The role based security – it’s brand new feature and will make life easier for most of us.

Upgrade from ConfigMgr. 2007 to vNext

There will be no in place upgrade from ConfigMgr. 2007 only a side by side migration is supported. I went thru the migration lab and must say it looks very promising. The migration feature will allow us to migrate objects like collections, packages, computer/user objects and much more. A very cool feature is that the migration wizard will keep track of how the different objects are related. So if you select one object the wizard will tell you that this object is related to different packages, collections etc. Furthermore you can schedule the migration job to occur on a schedule.

MMS SWAG

Thursday is also the last day where the Expo Hall is open. Just like kids in a candy store I went Swag hunting. The Swag will all be used in the next SCUG DK meeting and hopefully it will bring a little “MMS 2010 feeling” for those of you who didn’t make it all the way to Vegas.

Swag collected this year, System center caps, t-shirts, tons of badges (I Love Wally, I love ConfigMgr and all the other products), cool stickers for your laptop and much more. In total I have at least 10 kg of swag to carry with me home = overweight. I guess I have to; either drop bying presents for my family or pay a huge amount of money to the Airline company :-)