Jeroen van Eesteren presented on System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012 Sunday morning at the Reviewers' Workshop at TechEd in Atlanta.

Van Eesteren started off by listing the goals of this new version of SCCM: Empower users, unify infrastructure, and simplify administration. On the device front, the big improvement is the addition of the ability to manager devices from SCCM. Devices that are currently managed by Exchange—including Android and iPhone devices—can be taken over by SCCM. You can manage settings and do things such as wiping devices, and SCCM will show the statuses of which devices have been switched from Exchange to its management.

The biggest takeaway for me about application management was supersedence, a feature that makes sure old versions of applications. Of course, my snapshot of the slide that actually showed supersedence came out blurry, so just pretend it's showing in that conspicuous blank space at the bottom of this picture:

Like System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which I already wrote about at TechEd, SCCM is in beta. Visit this Microsoft site to get in on the SCCM 2012 beta.