An update has been released to resolve issues where System Center Essentials updating Windows 7 SP1- based computers with locally published content may fail with error 0x80070570. Please refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2607070 for more details and download. This hotfix is expected to be installed...

The installation of SCE 2007 SP1 blocks with a warning “WSUS Valid Date”. This happens because the WSUS 3.0 SP1 image present on the SCE 2007 SP1 DVD is expired in October 2010. This blog lists the steps to download and install WSUS 3.0 SP2 to unblock and complete the installation of SCE...

At the Dynamics Convergence 2010 conference I mentioned to several people that it is possible to create a dynamic group based on whether a piece of software is installed or not but I never went into the details of how to do it. This posting describes how to create a group for a particular piece of installed...

A big thank you to everyone who stopped by and asked us questions at the Microsoft Management Summit and the Dynamics Convergence conferences during the last 2 weeks. In this post I’m going to talk about one area that we received feedback on at the conferences. Some people told us they wanted to see...

YES! It is finally here! We are very excited to announce the RTM of SCE 2010. You can read the official announcement at System Center Nexus , as well as the commentary from longtime SCE product manager, David Mills, at the Because Its’ Everybody’s Business site . Our original SCE 2007 brought...

The nice folks at ZD Net in the UK just posted their review of SCE 2010, based on the Release Candidate.   Click here to read the whole review, but their bottom line was: Virtualisation is definitely the big draw for SCE 2010, but there are enhancements to the other tools as well — not least...

The monitoring capability within Essentials comes from Management Packs, and the majority Management Packs that work with Operations Manager also work with Essentials. This is great, because it means there is a wealth of deep monitoring that is available for Essentials. During the Beta and RC period...

As we move from the Release Candidate to the final SCE product, we want to make sure that Microsoft Partners are ready to help our customers with the latest in systems management from Microsoft.  SCE 2010 is one of two System Center products that will be released next quarter, so we are running...

Essentials 2010 uses up to three agents to manage computers: Windows Update agent - built into the Windows operating system, configured via Group Policy - provides update distribution, software distribution and hardware & software inventory Operations Manager agent - deployed to managed...

Recently, the folks at TechNet Edge sat down with David Mills and Edwin Yuen for a brief discussion of Microsoft’s IT management and virtualization solution for midsize businesses. With the release of public betas for System Center Essentials 2010 and Data Protection Manager 2010, customers will have...

Do you know what time it is? Yes, it’s THAT time…time for you to check out the next full release of System Center Essentials – SCE 2010! For those of you who were with us for the release of System Center Essentials 2007 a little over two years ago, you know that this is Microsoft’s IT management solution...

We’ve seen reports of people unsuccessfully attempting to install Essentials 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 x64 and wanting to use SQL Server 2005 Express as the database. We have published KB 975344 to provide more information on supported configurations involving Windows Server 2008 x64. We recommend...

System Center Essentials provides several ways to remotely manage computers, including: Computer Management MMC Remote Desktop Remote Assistance Tasks to show current information, such as process usage Sometimes though what is wanted is just a remote command window without the overhead of opening a full...

At the Microsoft Management Summit and TechEd this year we announced  System Center Essentials 2010, the next version of Essentials. We also started to talk about the new features, in particular how we’ve placed virtualization capabilities in Essentials, providing a single location for monitoring...

Have you wondered why some of the performance views and dashboards in the Monitoring Space don’t have any data to display, yet others do? You can see an example of this by going to the Monitoring Space, expanding the Microsoft Windows Server folder and then expanding the Performance sub Folder.  ...

As Dustin mentioned in the previous post , we recently released an update to the Microsoft.SystemCenter.Essentials.2007.mp. We have also released KB956890 which provides additional details. This update resolves an issue where the Remote Assistance task fails to execute if the System Center Essentials...

A question came up in the Technet forums around content caching, and what variables exist to adjust it. The footprint of cached content on the wSUS/SCE server take into consideration four variants: Products (XP/2K3 as examples) Classifications (Seciruty / Critical / Service packs) ...

Over the past six months, many within the System Center Essentials community provided feedback on the inability of SCE to show which updates and software are needed by managed systems. Workarounds exist today for Microsoft Update content, but when it comes to locally-published content, or driver content...