Reporting

This feature is great for reviewing the status of the environment, for showing return on investment, and for matching licensing with what is actually installed. It grants visibility into the enterprise with the integration of Asset Intelligence This allows you to gain an understanding of licensing (Microsoft and third-party licenses), asset age, Client Access License (CAL) utilization, product families/categories, and much more insightful data. With this feature you can create web-based reports, via Configuration Manager or through SQL Reporting Services, that can show all the data that has been collected by the various other Configuration Manager features, such as software update deployment success or a list of computers of a certain manufacturer.

You can also group together commonly viewed reports into dashboards for easy viewing with just one click. Numerous reports are already created out of the box, and you can create your own custom reports with a little knowledge of SQL queries. In ConfigMgr 2012 the only report option is based on Reporting Services. This is the most beneficial piece of service management for ITIL and MOF: being able to report everything that is going on with the IT resources makes the job of auditing and reporting a simple one.