This document includes common questions about Microsoft’s System Center products, including Virtual Machine Manager, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator, and Service Manager. Information about Intune is at /tools-services-support/it-systems-infrastructure/msinf/aad/device/intune/.
How is the System Center suite licensed at the UW?
All UW licensing is restricted to computers owned by the UW. System Center licensing is available to employees and students, via the Enrollment for Server Platform Academic (ESPA) program in the Microsoft campus agreement. Intune licensing is covered separately–see the page noted above.
Can I install System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) in NETID?
Yes. Changes to SCCM circa 2016 have resulted in the ability for anyone to install it in a domain without domain admin permissions.
However, in a shared domain, you can not use SCCM’s Active Directory based discovery to on-board SCCM clients. There are several instances of SCCM running in the NETID domain.
It is worth noting that UW-IT is looking at how we can offer SCCM as a central service.
Will SCCM be a centrally provided offering in NETID?
UW-IT’s Managed Workstation service migrated its services into the NETID domain in 2017, and deployed SCCM in NETID as a result. UW-IT considered offering a central service but interest from IT units on campus was low.
Will I be able to get delegated permissions in a central SCCM over my computers?
If interest in a central solution changed and UW-IT provided such a solution …
We looked at several models for delegation with SCCM, and all of them require a fairly significant amount of effort to maintain, which would make a model with delegation rather expensive. We have not ruled it out and would discuss this further with Microsoft, but delegation is not likely to be something we could support easily.
Doesn’t <insert name of some university here> have a delegated SCCM model?
Probably. We’ve talked with our peers and several institutions, and with Microsoft, about various delegated management models. Most of the models require a significant amount of work to implement and maintain, while the rest are only viable in smaller environments or require delegation that would be unacceptably broad here.