Chapter 1. Before you begin

I still remember vividly my first foray into Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager. I was working as a network and systems administrator, and the IT team that I was a part of had just made an unfortunate discovery. Our fleet of desktops and laptops had increased fourfold in a short space of time, and the deployment techniques we were using, which were just about satisfactory for a small environment, couldn’t possibly scale and were now shown to be completely impractical. Even worse, we were facing a hardware refresh of nearly a third of the fleet, with no streamlined way to achieve it.

I jumped online and researched options, and Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) came up time and time again as the best-of-breed ...

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