Hi All, We are trying to work out whether or not to purchase SCCM 2012 or some other technology to assist with desktop/server fleet management. Today have many disparate systems that all do a subset of what we need. In addition to that we have Windows 7 upcoming and need to deploy it and hundreds of application packages. The new technology MUST: Deploy Windows 7 to any bare bones machine (including driver insertion) Deploy Windows 2008 to any bare bones machine regardless (including driver insertion) Deploy Software from MSI Deploy Software from Non-MSI (flat file, single registry key, third party installer) Deploy Software based on Active Directory Group Membership Deploy Software with ‘pre-requisites and supersedes’ smarts built in Deploy Windows Security Patches Deploy Windows Security Patches with respect to groups (ie node A is patched fully before node B is patched) Ability to Permanently exclude Security Patches that are irrelevant to a system Ability to Disapprove a Security Patches Report on Windows Security Patch Gaps Report on software deployments for licensing compliance Support a replicated Multi-tiered infrastructure deployments (Internal, DMZ-I, DMZ-E info all in the same Microsoft SQL database) Be supported by the supplying vendor on a vmware platform Provide a configuration management database that lets you put manual descriptions hardware, asset and IP addressing information in The new technology SHOULD: Allow you to Add/Remove things from an SOE without having to recreate SOE from scratch. Deploy user based software that installs on first run instead of installing all your apps upon first log in Allow administrative removal of an application from a machine when you’re out of a group Automatically associate users to machines based on the last log on Report on hardware inventory Report on software inventory Report on user to machine inventory Not require the user to have local administrative privileges Any kinds of suggestion and input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks