Michael Niehaus' Windows and Office deployment ramblings
People have made fun of ConfigMgr, and every version of SMS before that, for being “slow moving software”. For those of you who try to deploy software to a machine and then wait for it to actually happen, you know what I mean: it was guaranteed to take two minutes from the time you advertised it to the time the first clients acted on it.
With ConfigMgr SP2, a significant portion of that delay (which was actually happening on the client side, not on the server) was removed. Now, I can add a new machine into a collection, then go to the machine and initiate a machine policy retrieval cycle and see a popup for new advertisements within a few seconds. The first time that happened I was a bit startled by the result – surely something must be wrong. But it wasn’t, the advertisement really was available that quickly.
ConfigMgr SP2 is still available as an RC through http://connect.microsoft.com, so you can try it out in your lab if you want. It is expected to be released by the end of October.