To all of our customers...

Wow—it’s been almost 15 years now since the announcement was made for this new product from Microsoft: Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 1.0. The original charter was to “provide easier and more cost-effective management of desktop hardware and software throughout large-scale computing systems, easing what has been one of the most expensive and time-consuming aspects of client-server computing, and enabling customers to run their businesses more effectively.” Sound applicable today? That charter still applies, even though the characteristics and importance for those features have taken on different meanings over the past 15 years, and we are so proud of what we think System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007 and SCCM 2007 R2 add to this long history. Quite frankly, this is the most significant release of SMS/SCCM ever, and the value we believe it will bring to you, our customers, is tremendous. Fifteen years ago, deploying Windows wasn’t as hard—you just put in six floppy diskettes! Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA were just part of the “golden rule”—not governmental and corporate obligations. And software distribution was “good enough” if it did just slightly better than you could do if you went from machine to machine manually. Now...you bet your business success on the ability to get software to the right systems at the right time. The core disciplines have remained the same, but the world has evolved to place further demands on those cores. That is what SCCM 2007 is all about: continuing to solidify and extend that core discipline of change and configuration management to today’s business problems, with the reliability you’ve come to expect.

But the greatest thing in those 14+ years is not the 1’s and 0’s we’ve shipped to the market—it’s the relationships we’ve made with you, the tens of thousands of SCCM administrators around the world. We are very aware that a large degree of the SMS/SCCM success over the years is attributable to you, your passion and commitment to the problem of systems management and our product. What we’ve built, you’ve tweaked. What we’ve omitted, you’ve filled in. What we’ve gotten wrong, you’ve worked around—and let us know how to do it right next time. It’s this relationship in working with you, in building our software and solving your needs, that makes us most proud to come to work every day.

What we’ve all learned in the software industry is that software is never perfect. We obviously continue to strive for perfection when it comes to quality and security, but we know with as large and diverse a group of customers that we have, there will be no way we get every feature you need, or every feature done in the way you need it. However, our “luxury” is that we have the best people on the planet using our product on a daily basis. You—our SCCM administrators—share the same passion in solving your problems and helping your fellow administrators, that we do in building the product. This book is just another testament to that dedication and spirit. We want to thank the authors (SCCM administrators, like you) for their ongoing support of our product and this community. And we look forward to continuing this relationship for years (and releases) to come!

With greatest admiration,

The System Center Configuration Manager Product Group