With Microsoft’s new Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) release cadence, they’re adding and improving features with remarkable swiftness! Whether you are a seasoned veteran or a complete newcomer to ConfigMgr, you may be wondering what is new/has changed in the product since it originally shipped back in November last year.
In the 1606 release Software Center has had a makeover:
Prior to 1606 if you wanted to control the Client Cache you had to append various switches to the ccmsetup command line. In 1606 you now have the ability to centrally control settings. A good example is whether to use the Client Cache and its maximum size (either in MB or as a percentage of disk space), via the Client Cache Settings group in Client Settings. This also means you can apply these settings globally by modifying the default client settings, or you can create customised client settings that you apply to different Collections to meet your needs.
You maybe have multiple Software Update Points (SUPs) in your environment. If the SUP the client is using fails, the client retries the failed SUP for up to two hours. Now in 1606 if you know a SUP has failed you can right click on a Collection containing the affected clients, select Client Notification then click on the new Switch to next Software Update Point action to tell these clients to use the next SUP in their list of SUPs.
Previously whenever you viewed a piece of content and you wanted to know its status, and clicked on the Content Status link, it took you to the Content Status node showing the status of all content—not just the specific piece of content you are interested in. This has been changed in 1606 to take you to the status for the relevant piece of content.
If you are running ConfigMgr 1606 and Windows 10 Anniversary edition PCs, you can now have multiple on-premise Mobile Device Management (MDM) Device Management Points.
You can now create various categories for your MDM enrolled devices. When a user enrolls a device they can choose the category or you can specify rules on your Collections so when a device in enrolled it is assigned to a certain category.
You can now customise these settings through new RamDiskTFTPBlockSize and RamDiskTFTPWindowSize Registry keys which should resolve issues with timeout errors.
During an Operating System Deployment (OSD) of an image you now have the ability to either perform a full scan for software updates if your image is out-of-date. Or, if your image is relatively up-to-date, you can now use a cached set of scan results to limit which software updates are installed thus speeding up your deployments. To do this select the new Evaluate software updates from cached scan results checkbox which is part of the Install Software Updates step.
You can now use the new SMSTSSoftwareUpdateScanTimeout Task Sequence variable to specify a timeout value to control how long the update scan should run. Plus logging of the update process has been improved so you will now see the smsts.log referring out to the other logs used in the software update scanning process.
There have been several changes to the Updates and Servicing node:
In addition to the above, 1606 includes the following:
There are also some items that have been deprecated in 1606 and others that have been moved to pre-release. In 1606 some pre-release features are included in the production build. You have the option of enabling these options so they are available in the console. For more information see: What's new in version 1606 of Configuration Manager