Microsoft released first Technical preview for Configuration Manager in this year 2019 with some exciting features Client health dashboard, management insights rules for collections,DP maintenance mode,search device using MAC address and many others.
If you want to get this preview install in your lab ,get the baseline version of Technical preview version 1810.2 from TechNet evaluation center . For more information about Technical previews ,please read here
Once you install baseline version, you will see 1901 in the console . Installation of Technical previews from the console is simple and very straight forward .
List of features that are added with this preview version 1901 are:
- Client health dashboard
- Specify priority for feature updates in Windows 10 servicing
- Dedicated monitoring for phased deployments
- Run CMPivot from the central administration site
- Improvements to Run PowerShell Script task sequence step
- Office products on lifecycle dashboard
- Management insight rules for collections
- Search device views using MAC address
- Distribution point maintenance mode
- Optimized image servicing
- Import a single index of an OS image
- Use Azure Resource Manager for cloud services
- Confirmation of console feedback
- Create a Configuration Manager technical preview lab in Azure
- Specify a custom port for peer wakeup
- View recently connected consoles
- Stop cloud service when it exceeds threshold
- Client provisioning mode timeout
- Improvements to OS deployment
Some of the features that I am interested are client health dashboard ,insight for collection rules ,search device using MAC Address ,DP maintenance ,view recently connected consoles, monitoring phase deployment,create preview lab in azure.
I recently did blog post on how to identify the collections with different criteria and how to correct the collections where needed http://eskonr.com/2019/01/sccm-configmgr-remove-collection-membership-for-direct-rule-collections-using-powershell/
Now Microsoft added way to identify the collections with different criteria listed below and take necessary action.
you can use these insights to simplify management and improve performance.
The following rules are in the Collections group:
- Collections with no query rules and no direct members: To simplify the list of collections in your hierarchy, delete these collections.
- Collections with the same re-evaluation start time: These collections have the same re-evaluation time as other collections. Modify the re-evaluation time so they don't conflict.
- Collections with query time over two seconds: Review the query rules for this collection. Consider modifying or deleting the collection.
- The following rules include configurations that potentially cause unnecessary load on the site. Review these collections, then either delete them, or disable rule evaluation:
- Collections with no query rules and incremental updates enabled
- Collections with no query rules and enabled for scheduled or incremental evaluation
- Collections with no query rules and schedule full evaluation selected
Double click on collection, you will see list of rules with progress status. Progress status will tell you whether action needed or not .
For each rule that it evaluates ,it will tell you if there is any action needed by admin or not .
From above, some rules says ,action needed. To know what collections ,just double click on the rule to see .
I double click on Empty collections to see what collections are they.
I have a collection that has empty members . I can take action on this .
Once you are done, you can re-evaluate the rule by simply right click and re-evaluate .
Like there ,there are many other features added to preview version 1901.
Happy testing!