Compliance settings in CM12—known as Desired Configuration Management (DCM) in CM07—have taken on an important new feature: Remediation. Remediation uses local policy just as active directory uses group policies. With CM12, it is now possible to not only create a list of settings, but to enforce them as well.

There are a variety of ways to use compliance settings. One you are already aware of is Software Updates, which are nothing more than a bunch of Configuration Items (CIs) downloaded from Microsoft. When you bundle them in a deployment, you are basically creating a baseline with remediation set.

Perhaps you are currently using a software inventory to look for a program and you don't really care about all the other details that inventory fills your database with, such as location, size, dates, and so on. If you just want to know whether the program is there or not, compliance settings can tell you that by looking for it via a registry, a WMI entry, or a file.

This chapter will...