If you didn’t like System Center 2010, you won’t like System Center 2012 – simple as that.
The System Center suite of products seems to be designed for large organizations with very large data centers and very large numbers of users. Large enough to justify the steep hardware, license, and manpower requirements to run SC2012. (I should point out that this is nothing new – several people have told me that System Center requires a team to manage it)
System Center 2012 is indeed very powerful and flexible, but that comes at a cost – it is also very complex. While each component has a similar-looking “user friendly” interface, a quick browse through the documentation sets any illusions of simplicity aside.
Lets take System Center Service Manager as an example. This component provides helpdesk functionality, as well as the ability to automate / document / standardize IS processes. It sounds like exactly what we need. Now have a look at the documentation:
Here are the major sections of this massive document collection
- Planning Guide
- Deployment Guide
- Administrator’s Guide
- Operations Guide
- Authoring Guide
- Disaster Recovery Guide
So I just installed the thing and I want to get started. Where do I go? As far as I can tell, there is no “Getting Started.” The documentation is broken up so that the Installation team has a set of docs, the administrators have a set of docs, the Operators have a set of docs, etc, etc. This is not bad per se – it is just bad if you don’t have a lot of time, and you don’t have multiple teams (much less even one team) to manage the thing.
