One of the much-anticipated features of System Center Configuration Manager 2012 is its ability to manage non-Windows mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones and Android.
I’ve finally got Exchange 2010 up and running in my lab environment at home (on Hyper-V, of course!) and have connected the mail applications on an Android system (which is running within a VM) and an iPod Touch to a couple of test user mail accounts on Exchange, and verified that they’re connected and can send/receive mail. So what’s next?
Rather than importing directly into the console, SCCM 2012 imports mobile devices by connecting to one or more Exchange systems and importing the information of devices which have synced against that Exchange server.
To do this, you need to set up an Exchange Server Connector within the SCCM console:
SCCM 2012 - Exchange Connector
Then on the General tab, specify whether you’re connecting to an on-premise or a hosted Exchange server (yay for cloud!) along with the credentials of an account which has the necessary access rights:
SCCM 2012 - Exchange Server Settings
On the Discovery page, specify how often you want SCCM to poll the Exchange server for mobile device updates, how to handle inactive devices and whether to look for devices throughout the entire Exchange organisation or just within particular OUs – this is useful if you want to roll out SCCM management of mobile devices in a staged fashion, or whether there are certain devices which are to be totally excluded from SCCM management:
SCCM 2012 - Discovery Behaviour
Finally in Settings, make any modifications required to general settings (eg: allowing internet sharing from mobile devices), email handling, user password, device security and applications – these settings will override the default ActiveSync policy on the Exchange server:
SCCM 2012 - Device Policies
Once complete, the connector will refresh according to the defined schedule, or you can force a refresh any time by right-clicking the connector and selecting “Synchronize Now”.
If you head over to the Assets and Compliance pane and select Devices, and the synced mobile devices should now be available:
SCCM 2012 - Imported Devices
That’s the basics….much more to come on this particular topic 
It’s also worth noting that you can have multiple Exchange connectors – great for moving Exchange servers around or for centralising mobile device management across separate Exchange organisations (even completely different AD domains).
Looking forward to more on this! We will be replacing Altiris with SCCM 2012 in our environment at the beginning of the year and this feature will be awesome to have.
Did you see in your testing if SCCM 2012 mobile device management has the ability to unlock the iOS device passcode if user forgets their passcode. Other MDM’s have this capability so wondered if that was within the scope of SCCM 2012.
Hi Terry – I didn’t come across that functionality explicitly. iOS device management with CM12 is really bound to the capabilities of ActiveSync, so if you can do a passcode reset in ActiveSync, then yes. Otherwise No. I’m looking at some 3rd-party extensions to CM07/12 which offer native device management of iOS and Android, so I’ll remember this particular feature request and see whether it’s available.
Hi James,
Did SCCM 2012 inculde advance feature like Selective Wipe and blocking devices?
Thanks in Advance,
Hi Raj – I don’t recall exactly, but as always, the basic rule of thumb is that if it’s supported in Exchange ActiveSync, then SCCM 2012 can do it. If you’re looking for native MDM within SCCM, perhaps a third-party plug-in like Odyssey Athena would be worth looking at?