If you enable the power management settings on a collection you have the ability to establish a wakeup time for that set of machines.  So, if you want machines to wake up at 2:00am to see if there is any work to be done you can do that.  Only downside is that ONLY applies to desktop computers.  So, any laptops that are in that collection will not be woken up.  The logic behind this is the laptop may be sitting in a backpack or something and we may not want it automatically woken up in the middle of the night and causing the laptop to overheat and catch fire!  Perhaps some logic will be added later that says apply the wakeup time to the laptop but only if it's plugged into an AC outlet.  But, that is not in the works as of this time.

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 in SCCM we have 'get' behavior for DCM baselines.  So, we can tell what machines are (or are not) compliant for a baseline and then use a query-based collection to find computers that are compliant (or not) and take action on them.  As an FYI SCCM V.Next will include 'set' behavior so we'll have the ability to auto-remedate non-compliant machines.  

One little-discussed feature in R3 is that we can select a baseline in the console and have that query-based collection built for us.  So, it can automatically create a compliant or non-compliant query for the baseline that we selected and therefore saves us some steps in building the query manually.   

Another question that comes up alot.  Beta1 is out now but is not meant to be deployed in a production environment.  Expect R3 to be released in the second half of 2010.

Digging a bit deeper into R3 and will be posting some stuff.   I already talked about what happens if a computer is in two collection with different power policy settings.  In summary, SCCM will utilze the least impactful setting.  But what if the computer is one collection that has the power management setting enabled but is set to 'never apply power management...' and in another collection that has power settings configured? 

What you will see reflected in the pwrmgmt.log on the computer is an entry "This machine has been opted-out from any Power Policy changes by policy".  So, because the least impactful setting is to not apply power settings, that is what the client does.  If you disable the power management setting on the collection that was set to never apply, the computer is then able to get the other power policy as expected.

Also remember that the power reports will use SRS ONLY!  So, this is a great time to implement SRS on your SCCM site and get familiar with it. 

Also, there are some questions around if you need to install R2 before you install R3.  The answer is no.  You DO need to install SP2, but you can install R3 directly and it will install and enable the R2 features as part of the R3 install.  Also don't forget to deploy the client hotfix and don't forget to review the MOF changes that are made so you can get an idea of what is in there.

Had a short outage while they cut everything over but I am back!