Latest news on MS System Center 2012 Suite

This year the MS System Center 2012 Suite will be presented. There's nothing official to find about release dates, so my guess stays on Q1 2012 or probably Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) which is in April 16-20. The last months there were some interesting news around System Center, so here a quick overview.

Here we go:

• All products within the MS System Center 2012 Suite will have a new release (on the same time)
• There will be more integration within the various System Center products (because of Service Manager and Orchestrator)
• Service Manager will be the most important product in the 2012 suite (integration with Operations Manager [tickets], Configuration Manager [assets], and so on)
• Service Manager 2012 is the only version which integrates with Configuration Manager 2012, not the current one
• Forefront Endpoint Protection (FEP) will be called System Center Endpoint Protection (SCEP) from now on
• There will be integration between ConfigMgr and Orchestrator (checks and so on)

And some ConfigMgr 2012 news also:

• There will be Migration tools build-in to migrate applications, collections and OS images (and so on) by default
• With Package Conversion Manager (PCM) it's possible to convert old 2007 packages to the new 2012 application model
• Mobile Device Management (MDM) will have the same functionality as in Exchange 2010 (nothing more unfortunately)
• It's possible to simulate application deployments before they actually will be installed (isn't that cool?)
• Endpoint Protection will be integrated in ConfigMgr 2012 by default (no extension anymore)
• There will be (probably) e-mail notification in Software Catalog approvals (not in the console only)

It will be an exciting year with new products/functionality, and finally a brand new MS System Center 2012 Suite!