Hey there folks!

I see lots of news coming about SCOM 2012 and other SC products for 2012, but nothing for System Center Essentials. Can someone update us on this? Is there to be a SCE 2012, or is being renamed/rebranded, or ?? Just trying to figure out what I'm doing in the future, as to whether to stick to SCOM, or move to SCE, or ??

Thanks in advance!

mpleaf

Hello Mpleaf,

We have not yet provided an update or roadmap regarding SCE.

As we move forward with the development of System Center 2012, we remain committed to providing a “right-sized” set of management tools for IT in the midmarket segment that makes it easy for these customers to set up and manage Hyper-V. We anticipate that details on our midmarket strategy will be released in the months ahead. We will be sure to communicate any updates through all regional marketing leads and channels as well as this discussion group.

In the interim, Essentials 2010 remains an important and strategic management solution as part of Microsoft’s System Center family of IT systems management products allowing us to compete head-to-head with VMware in the midmarket segment. SCE 2010 is easy to deploy and provides customers a unified single console solution that enables proactive IT management of more physical and virtual Windows Servers than ever before. In FY12, SCE 2010 continues to play an important role for our customers and their Journey to the Cloud as part of the Managed Virtualization story for the mid-market segment.

Hope it helps,

I too am wondering the same thing as mpleaf.

While "we remain committed to providing a “right-sized” set of management tools for IT in the midmarket segment" sounds promising, it's still a shame not much is known about the future of SCE.

I've put asside the budget for implementing it in 2012, but very similar to TMG, the fact that no roadmap exists/is provided is holding me back/making me look in other directions. I think I'm not alone in needing to think/plan ahead and not implementing something that will be discontined soon, Windows Essential Business Server comes to mind.

 

Hello Mpleaf,

We have not yet provided an update or roadmap regarding SCE.

As we move forward with the development of System Center 2012, we remain committed to providing a “right-sized” set of management tools for IT in the midmarket segment that makes it easy for these customers to set up and manage Hyper-V. We anticipate that details on our midmarket strategy will be released in the months ahead. We will be sure to communicate any updates through all regional marketing leads and channels as well as this discussion group.

In the interim, Essentials 2010 remains an important and strategic management solution as part of Microsoft’s System Center family of IT systems management products allowing us to compete head-to-head with VMware in the midmarket segment. SCE 2010 is easy to deploy and provides customers a unified single console solution that enables proactive IT management of more physical and virtual Windows Servers than ever before. In FY12, SCE 2010 continues to play an important role for our customers and their Journey to the Cloud as part of the Managed Virtualization story for the mid-market segment.

Hope it

Hi,

are there any updates about the future of SCE ?

Thanks

Hope that Microsoft just bundles the SC 2012 products into a smaller/cheaper suite.

As it is now, Microsoft does not give proper support for SCE. It's like a ghetto app that does not get proper attention. Lots of hotfixes were published for SCOM that were never "backported" to SCE, for example. SCE 2010 doesn't support Dynamic Memory and never will, lagging behing SCVMM 2008 R2 SP1. It will even lag more after SCVMM 2012 and Hyper-V 3. We now have DPM for essentials (SCE Plus), but nothing is told about if users are able to move to DPM 2012, or if they are stuck with 2010. You install DPM 2010 and can't enter the correct licensing information, because it expects per OSE but SCE Plus is per Server. There is no roadmap, no information, no ongoing beta, etc.

So, its a great time for Microsoft to clean up. Just make SCE a bundle of the officially supported apps, and light up licensing (license per server , limit to 50 servers, 500 clients). It's not that hard to figure out how to work with WSUS and SCOM console. Hell, even SCCM is not that hard.

Agreed ricdgr, SCE unfortunately doesn't get the same attention that the full SC suite of products does.  I have found myself wishing many times that there was some upgrade path from SCE to the full SC suite, because of the specific limitations built in to SCE.  I'm fine with the cap on how many clients and servers it can handle, but there are a lot of useful features that are available in SCOM, SCCM, and SCVMM that were stripped out in SCE.  The only part that really seems to get equal treatment is the "Plus" in SCE Plus, since it just adds licensing for the full version of DPM, instead of squeezing some of the DPM functionality into the core SCE console and stripping other features out.  With it being separate and the full product, we get all the appropriate patches and updates for DPM.  Of course, now that DPM 2012 is no longer a separate product, I wouldn't be surprised if SA for SCE Plus licensing doesn't cover the upgrade to DPM 2012, and we'll be stuck on an older version and end up in the same boat, not getting updates that 2012 does. 

I was told by MS Support via chat on the day of the SC2012 announcement that SCE2010 licenses would be automatically upgraded to the SC 2012 suite licenses via software assurance, but since that date everything I've seen has been non-committal or seeming to backpedal from that statement.  I guess we have to wait and see when SC2012 releases if they make any changes to our licensing for SCE2010 plus, or if they just ignore it and hope nobody notices.  

I would love to see a future version of SCE! The full SC suite is way too expensive but SCE is decent enough. Since Microsoft is very quiet about their future plans with SCE we are also investigating products like LabTech and Kaseya.

I really hope they atleast provide a patch to have windows 8 and windows 2012 work with system center essentials 2010.

System center configuration manaer 2012 is VERY diffuclt to use. To say update adobe flash on machines you need to use 2 or 3 different programs to do the same thing as one sce 2010. Its also a lot harder to approve updates in sccm 2012 then in essentials.

 ireally hope they change their minds and atleast release a patch for windows 8 and 2012 compatibility. I hate sccm 2012.

While SCCM is a bit more difficult to install, the scenario you said is quite easy and quite the same as with SCE.

Just enable Software Updates, import the Adobe catalog and enable the Flash updates.

If
you don't want to use the Software Update Point, just create a program
with the new Flash and superseed the old one. Quite easy and, as far as I
can see, quite flawless.

I really hope they atleast provide a patch to have windows 8 and windows 2012 work with system center essentials 2010.

System center configuration manaer 2012 is VERY diffuclt to use. To say update adobe flash on machines you need to use 2 or 3 different programs to do the same thing as one sce 2010. Its also a lot harder to approve updates in sccm 2012 then in essentials.

 ireally hope they change their minds and atleast release a patch for windows 8 and 2012 compatibility. I hate sccm 2012.

I definitely agree that there should be a patch ASAP for SCE to support the current OS versions.  It was disappointing that SCE was never updated to fully support 2008R2 SP1, but not updating it to offer any support for the newly released OS's is shameful when they still claim SCE 2010 is a current product. 

Still, the example you gave is only a minor concern to me, compared to the fact that DPM 2010, which is part of SCE+ licensing, doesn't support server 2012.  At this point, the "Current" MS system management and backup product we own and pay for SA on won't back up servers running the current version of their OS.  MS, give us a road map for SCE ASAP.  Tell us it's dead, or that a new version is in the works.  At a minimum, upgrade the DPM version included in SCE+ to DPM 2012, so that servers can be backed up until you do come up with a plan for the rest of SCE. 

Personally, my first thought was that I wish they would just kill SCE and grant owners w/ SA equivalent licensing for SC2012, but I've been playing with eval versions of SC2012 recently.  I have found that it's much more complicated to set up and has far greater hardware requirements than SCE did to get the same functionality, so at this point I don't know if the 'upgrade' would be a good thing or not.  

If we (or our customers) had the money for it I would definately prefer the whole System Center suite because that offers superior functionality compared to Essentials.

A roadmap for Essentials would be more then welcome, please tell us where it's going to!

BTW, if I remember correctly there was a WSUS update released which included support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.