System Center Essentials RC1 Available

The System Essentials team is very pleased to announce the availability of the Release Candidate 1 software on the Microsoft Connect website.We encourage you to promptly download and start testing this exciting release of SCE! What's new in Essentials RC1?

Capabilities:

• Support for upgrading from WSUS 2.0 and 3.0
• Emailed Daily Health Report
• Automatic scheduled discovery of computers from Active Directory
• Enhanced network monitoring of SNMP-enabled network devices including a network topology diagram view
• Remote Control support for remote control of managed client and server computers
• Ability to import Update catalogs from third-party software publishers
• SQL Services based reporting on monitoring, hardware and software inventory
• Setup experience improvements for SQL Server selection and file locations
• More management packs including support for Exchange 2003, Dynamics CRM 3.0, and Active Directory

Enhanced Platform support

• non-English US locales
• installing Essentials on x64 servers
• managing Windows Vista
• managing x64 systems
• Support for managing systems in multiple domains in a single forest

System Center Essentials RC1 at Connect