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You’ve heard about it and read about and now you’ll soon have the chance to try it out yourself.  The System Center Online Desktop Manager beta is coming soon:

The System Center Online team has been working hard in preparation for its next beta release of System Center Online Desktop Manager, expected in the fall of this year.  This exclusive beta will only be available to a select number of customers.  Our last beta was only offered to a small audience and resulted in a lot of great feedback from the customers who participated.  This time we are widening the scope to include a few hundred customers.

Here's what will be included in the upcoming release:

  • Updates Management Workload:  Manage the Microsoft updates from a web-based console.  Review available updates, choose updates and deploy to selected computers or groups of computers.  Imagine WSUS from the cloud.
  • Policy Workload: Provides the ability to configure operational settings of the Windows Update and Anti-Malware agents installed on the client computers. 
  • Anti-malware Workload: Review anti-malware, anti-virus status and remedial actions from the SCODM console.  Ensure managed computers have up-to-date signatures.
  • Assets Workload: Collect detailed hardware and software inventory on managed computers. View this information in reports.  Use the License reconciliation feature to load your Microsoft volume license agreement information and compare installed application quantities with licensed quantities.
  • Alerts Workload: Helps you quickly and easily find problems (or potential) on your computers. You can also get help on how to solve the problem or how to start troubleshooting.

We are looking for customers who are interested in participating in the fall beta!  If you are an IT Pro who manages an IT environment and are interested in participation, we'd like to hear from you.

For all the details see http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenteronline/archive/2009/09/23/system-center-online-desktop-manager-beta-is-coming-soon.aspx

Enjoy!

J.C. Hornbeck | Manageability Knowledge Engineer