Configuration Manager 2007 R3 Beta released

Power management is at the core of the ConfigMgr 2007 R3 release, and addresses the need that many organizations have to monitor and reduce both power consumption and CO2 emissions.  R3 Power Management leverages the power management features built into Windows to apply relevant and consistent settings to computers in the organization. 

There are three major components to power management in R3:

• Monitoring and Planning: The Power Management feature collects information about computer usage and power settings for computers in the origination.  Reports are provided to allow the administrator to analyze this data and determine optimal power management settings for computers.
• Enforcement: Power management allows the administrator to create power plans which can be applied to collections of computers. These power plans configure Windows power management settings on computers, and different power plans can be configured for peak and non-peak working hours.
• Compliance: After applying power plans to computers in the organization, the administrator can run reports to validate that power settings were correctly applied and to calculate power and carbon footprint savings across collections of computers.

In addition to Power Management, R3 will deliver enhancements to Scale and Performance.  In the scale area, R3 shifts the number of supported clients to 300,000 per site.  With respect to performance, R3 will provide improvements to AD Discovery with a new feature called Delta Active Directory Discovery.  When combined with an additional new feature called Dynamic Collection addition, Administrators will able to significantly reduce the time it takes to reflect AD changes, and Collection updates.  Finally, R3 delivers a new capability to OS Deployment, called Prestaged Media.  This will allow organizations to package their OS boot and install WIM image components into 1 common image, that can be provided to their hardware vendor, or supplier.  This feature builds on top of existing Task Sequence technology, and integrates fully with OS deployment capabilities.

You can download and experience the beta of Configuration Manager 2007 R3.  You can find access to this download here.

The Configuration Manager documentation library (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb680651.aspx) has been updated on the Web and the latest content on the Web has Updated: April 1, 2010 at the top of the topic. Additionally, the Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 Release Notes are updated to clarify which versions of 64-bit Windows Server 2008 are subject to a known issue when using WAIK 2.0 for operating system deployment.