Microsoft released the technical preview 3 of SCCM vNext  with these major new features mentioned on their Blog.

1. Deployment of required applications to Windows 10 devices managed via on-premise mobile device management
2. Cluster aware settings
3. High available support with SQL Server 2014 AlwaysOn
4. Ability to run software cleanup tasks

And all features from the TechNet article

• Diagnostics and Usage Data
• Service a server cluster
• Support for SQL Server AlwaysOn for highly available databases
• Deploy Windows Business Store applications
• App deployment to Windows 10 devices with on-premises MDM
• Compliance settings for Windows 10
• Improved workflow for creating mobile device configuration items
• Updates for Windows 10 in-place upgrade
• Updates for bulk enrollment of Windows 10 devices with on-premises MDM

Here are those i find particular interesting or worth mentioning.

Cluster aware settings with Windows Updates

This on in particular is a really nice new feature which will reduce the time to update clusters. This feature essentially will tell SCCM to keep a predefined percentage of servers in the collection up and running to prevent service interruption.

i.E.:

You have 4 Servers and set the percentage to 50% there will always be 2 nodes up and running.

If you have only 2 servers in the collection is does not matter what kind of percentage you set, it will always keep one node up and running.

 

If you select the settings button you can configure the percentage and you could edit a script which will run on node drain or node resume, if you need to run a special script after the node resumes.

Running software cleanup tasks

If you tick that little box in your SUP it will automatically run a WSUS cleanup job after you synced your updates (every 30 days). This will keep the WSUS DB fast and snappy for a long time without you to manually clean up WSUS.

You can also monitor this process in the “wsynmgr.log”

Cloud connection point

When you install TP3 this new site system role will be automatically installed. It  essentially is a “new” customer feedback integrated into SCCM with a role you can configure a little bit more granular. Currently you can just switch it on or off.

Microsoft will add more settings in future releases. Which contain the following settings:

• Basic includes data about setup and upgrade like the number of sites and which Configuration Manager features are enabled. No personally indefinable information will be transmitted.
• Enhanced includes the data in the Basic setting plus transmits data about the hierarchy, how each feature is used (frequency and duration), and enhanced diagnostic information like the memory state of your server when a system or app crash occurs. No personally identifiable data will be transmitted.
• Full includes the data in the Basic and Enhanced settings and also sends advanced diagnostic information like system files and memory snapshots. This option may include personally identifiably information, but we won’t use that information to identify or contact you, or target advertising to you.

The current default installation is Online and Enhanced

 

Newish Client Update settings

This feature was introduced in TP2 but I find it interesting to mention this.

I guess this feature just installs new updates for the selected collection automatically. But I was not able to find any further information online about this.

In the monitoring pane you can also look at the status for this particular client status.

All in all nice new features for the TP3. Let’s see what Microsoft will add to the next TPs until it will release the RTM product by the end of the year.

Cheers Philipp