Microsoft announced last night that ConfigMgr (SCCM) 2007 R3 had RTM’d. R3, like R2 before it, is not a service pack. It is a new release level that requires new licensing (covered by software assurance). The deployment will require an update, described in KB977384. This hotfix is required for the following computers that are running System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2):
- Primary and secondary site servers
- Remote administrator console servers
- Remote provider servers
- Client computers
ConfigMgr 2007 R3 can be referred to as the power management release. Steve Rachui of Microsoft goes into some depth on this in a blog post. Long story short: You can audit and report on power utilisation and costs in your organisation. You can identify waste using these reports. Using collections, you can apply a power policy to Windows computers. Then you can compare your earlier reports with new reports to see how and what you have saved.
As Steve notes, there are some other changes:
- Delta AD Discovery: Changes are picked up instead of doing a full discovery.
- Dynamic Collection Updating: One of the time consumers in new deployments is the time required for collection membership update intervals. This new interval type is used in a few key scenarios where time is critical. MS is recommending sparse usage.
- Pre-Staged Media: This is aimed at organisations who offload OS deployment to the OEM. Media can be created from your OSD and sent out to the likes of Dell who build your PCs OS in their factory.
- Scalability: Up to 300,000 clients are supported in a hierarchy.