Supported Upgrade Paths for the New System Center Configuration Manager

As is the case with any major product upgrade, customers are generally curious about the prerequisites to ensuring they can move their environment swiftly. One of the bigger questions posed after this week’s announcement about a new System Center Configuration Manager releasing this calendar year, is about the supported upgrade paths.

As reported, the next release of ConfigMgr is based on the 2012 version, so it’s a straight-forward in-place upgrade. But, usually there are revision-level gotchas for upgrades like this. System Center Configuration Manager 2012 SP2 and R2 SP1 fixes a lot of things with the product, and if you’re not at either of these revisions yet you should be.

However, there’s good news. The upgrade to the coming version can be performed against 2012 SP1, 2012 SP2, or 2012 R2 SP1. This means that if you’ve been planning to upgrade your 2012.x version, you can simply wait for the upcoming release of System Center Configuration Manager.