In case you missed it in one of my MMS posts, the beta for ConfigMgr 2007 R3 is now public and is available on Connect. I received the following in an email earlier today:
“Yesterday at the Microsoft Management Summit, Brad Anderson announced during his keynote the release of ConfigMgr07 R3 Beta. Power management is at the core of the R3 release, it addresses the need that many organizations have to monitor and reduce the power consumption of their computers. ConfigMgr07 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 ConfigMgr07 R3:
- Monitoring and Planning: Power Management 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, ConfigMgr07 R3 will provide customers with enhanced scale and performance support (scale to 300K managed clients per hierarchy, delta AD discovery, dynamic collection updates), as well as enablement of further capabilities for operating system deployment. A full list of the R3 features can be found on Microsoft Connect at the “What’s new in R3” post”.