Deploying software has traditionally been a major headache for IT Professionals, and System Center Essentials largely takes this away as you can see in the latest of my screencasts..

However you need to be aware of a few things:

  • It won’t do out of the box operating system deployment.
  • Software can be handled providing it’s a folder, exe or msi file, but doesn’t have the full capabilities of its big brother System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
  • I experienced an odd problem where the overall screen said the deployment was in progress but in fact, it did deploy correctly.
  • I used the default clients group in my demo. In reality you’ll need to create specific groups to deploy applications. At the simplest level this might be to split clients into 32 bit and 64 bit as many programs such as Office come in both forms.  You might take this further and create groups for HR accounting , remote workers and so on to deploy specialist software they need

Next week I’ll look at authoring management packs in SCE. In the meantime, If you want to try SCE yourself it’s included in  the TechNet Subscriptions  here or you can get a time bombed trial version here.