About this Book
Chapter 1 covers most of what you’ll need to know about this book, but there are a few extra points worth covering ahead of time.
While there are a couple of chapters that are theoretical in nature, the majority of content in the book is designed to be hands-on. To this end, chapter 2 covers setting up a fully functional, self-contained lab environment. I strongly recommend that you take the time to get your lab up and running, as the content makes much more sense if you’re implementing it in a live environment. If you don’t have a system with enough resources to run the lab environment, ask your boss nicely!
The content is designed to be consumed in order, as the labs in each chapter are built on those in the previous chapters. You might be really interested in application deployment, but resist the temptation to jump straight to that chapter (or any other chapter), as the labs are likely not to work if you haven’t completed the foundation tasks.
The content has been written for the latest version of Configuration Manager (Build 1511 at the time of writing) and for Windows 10 as the managed client (also Build 1511), but the information and labs will work on previous versions of Configuration Manager 2012, as well as on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, with little or no modification.