Behind the Curtain: Configuration Manager Servicing Strategy

Configuration Manager continues to be the most popular kid in the System Center class, and it seems this comes despite Microsoft's intent to promote the other System Center suite products more heavily. In reality, despite all of the Cloud chatter, on-premise management of endpoints is still very real and very alive and there's very little Microsoft can do to cull customer choice in this area.

So, as popular as Configuration Manager is, there are many IT Pros tasked with utilizing the product within their organizations. Configuration Manager is a beast of a product, providing a lion's share of capability and function, enabling IT to manage every aspect of PCs and devices connecting to the corporate network.

It's been stated recently that the latest version of Configuration Manager, 2012 R2, has probably the record on open Design Change Requests (DCRs), bugs, and proposed updates of any version of Configuration Manager ever. Regularly, through Microsoft's DCR submission program on Connect, customers submit new DCRs and then enlist community members to help "vote up" their submitted recommendations so that they get better exposure to Microsoft and more prominence in the ever growing list.

The team at Microsoft involved in addressing the requests is small. So, as the stack of DCRs continue to grow without seemingly any resolution, customers tend to get a bit agitated. To help customers understand the processes behind the madness of updates and feature request resolutions, Microsoft's Brian Huneycutt took to the System Center Configuration Manager Team Blog yesterday to walk through how the Configuration Manager team at Microsoft organizes updates through an integrated schedule.

In essence, Microsoft intends to release Cumulative Updates (CU's) once every quarter. Each CU is truly cumulative in that it is a large hotfix that pulls together all previously released hotfixes into a single distribution. When customers need to apply the latest fixes, they only need the very latest CU.

Read the full explanation: Configuration Manager Servicing Update