The Consumerization of IT
While the focus in Brad Anderson’s keynote yesterday was the cloud, today the topic was the consumerization of IT. Actually, the cloud and consumerization meet. They enable and feed upon each other. These devices were made for the cloud. Commonalities include:
- All about the service
- All about the app
- All about making the consumer and the end user more productive
Devices are becoming more diverse; over 50% of information workers will use a smart phone. What’s the impact of this on a product such as Configuration Manager? The number of objects in the hierarchy will double. The challenge in Configuration Manager is to enable users to be productive anywhere on any device, and to make it secure and compliant. This is the challenge Microsoft is addressing with Configuration Manager 2012, Beta 2 of which went public today.
There are three major areas or pillars in Configuration Manager 2012:
- User Empowerment
- Infrastructure Unification
- Infrastructure Simplification
Configuration Manager 2012 will manage settings for non-Windows devices, that is to say, for the iPad, iPhone, Symbian, and Android devices. It will also have further integration with Citrix.
The product will implement “supercedence” – it will take an application, determine that there is a newer version to apply, and then automate removal of the first version. The example demo’ed was replacing Visio 2007 with Visio 2010.
A significant amount of work has also been done with VDI, enabling you to do custom configurations and have Configuration Manager work differently on physical versus virtual platforms as well as pools of servers versus a single server.
The recent release of Forefront Endpoint Protection (December 2010) puts FEP on top of Configuration Manager. And to make that easier for Configuration Manager shops, Microsoft announced today that Forefront is now moving from an Enterprise CAL (client access license) to a Core CAL. As most organizations implementing Configuration Manager have an Enterprise Agreement and Core CAL, they now own FEP!
Also announced today was general availability of Windows Intune. Version 2 is now about 50% complete, so its functionality will continue to grow. Version 1 does client inventory, software updates, host protection, and some monitoring. The goal is for it to have functional parity with Configuration Manager in the areas where it makes sense.
