Led by Corporate VP, Brad Anderson, Microsoft has been making fantastic gains with its Cloud-based management solution, Microsoft Intune. In December, the company unveiled updates to the service that allows it to be updated quickly and efficiently, aligning it closer to how Office 365 is updated.
Obviously, Microsoft believes that mobile management is important. But, putting so much into developing Microsoft Intune's capabilities, has actually had a negative effect on the company's long-standing cash cow of the System Center Suite, Configuration Manager.
Configuration Manager has enjoyed a long history as the top on-premises management tool for companies worldwide, and still enjoys an extremely strong community of customers. Many of those loyal customers have come to question Microsoft's support for on-premises management after watching Microsoft Intune receive the bulk of fresh, exciting updates.
During the Q&A portion of the latest Success with Enterprise Mobility webcast series yesterday, Brad Anderson gave clues to how Microsoft intends to bring Configuration Manager into the modern, agile, Cloud-integrated world.
Sometime this year (date unconfirmed), Microsoft will release a service pack for Configuration Manager 2012 R2 that will bring new update functionality to the on-premises management system to bring it more in line with Microsoft Intune. Once installed, Configuration Manager will enjoy more frequent updates to make it mirror the new features provided with the quicker moving Microsoft Intune. There's only a few details on how the new update functionality will work, but it involves Microsoft pushing extension packs to a storage container in Azure where Configuration Manager servers can connect and sync updates.
