Are you Intune?

Working in the System Center space I occasionally I get asked about management of environments that don’t really fit the world that SCCM focuses on.  SCCM is not a cost effective solution for many small businesses and with a top scale of 200,000 clients (soon to increase with R3 release) there are a few very large environments that go beyond what SCCM can handle effectively.  For the smaller environments there is a related product called System Center Essentials.  This is a product aimed at 50-500 client machine companies and is essentially a combination of SCCM, SCOM, SCVMM and Hyper-V all rolled into one nice and affordable package.  For now, that is what I recommend to smaller IT shops.  However, there is a new offering coming online that may be appropriate for some organizations and it is called Microsoft Intune.  Intune is less a hybrid of things, like essentials is, and more of a SCCM-lite or  WSUS-lite offering.  It has some of the same features of SCCM but is hosted in the cloud so small businesses don’t have to pony up the money for server hardware and can more easily get at the key things they need.  It doesn’t have nearly the deep and rich feature set that SCCM has, but for some companies it might be the right answer.  Check it out if you think it might be the right thing for you!