Last Friday (18th September 2013) Microsoft released CU3 For SCCM 2012 SP1. This has a few little fixes, but the most important part is the addition of Windows 8.1 support.

Information about the update, and the hotfix itself is available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2882125/en-us

The install is required on Primary and Secondary sites, but not Distribution Points. It’s actually quite a nice installer and does the standard pre-requisite checks and has links to deployment instructions. It’s recommended to close all consoles, but a reboot of the server isn’t required (it will shut down a bunch of services anyway, so consider it an outage). Funnily enough, the installer says to restart your computer at the end also.

As part of the install, it will ask if you want to create packages to install the updated client, the console and server. With the push towards Applications rather than Packages you think they’d do both, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Note that you can’t update a standalone install of the console with this update, you’ll need to either deploy it, or manually run it. The install file should be located at “\\yourSCCMserver.yourdomain.com\SMS_PAA\hotfix\KB2882125\AdminConsole\i386” and the install string: “msiexec.exe /p configmgr2012adminui-sp1-kb2882125-i386.msp /L*v %TEMP%\configmgr2012adminui-sp1-kb2882125-i386.msp.LOG /q REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=mous”

You can take out the /q to actually see the install rather than waiting for msiexec.exe to disppear from your running processes :) I also needed to reboot after updating the console.

The install process went without a hitch for me, hopefully you’ll experience the same.

Thanks to @sam1310 for alerting me to this update.

Update: To clarify, this patch is for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 management, not deployment.

To officially deploy Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 you still need SCCM 2012 R2. This explains it quite well: http://myitforum.com/myitforumwp/2013/09/23/windows-8-1-management-path/

 If you are still running System Center Configuration Manager 2007, the SCCM Team has announced that they will be providing an update for Windows 8.1 (and Server 2012 R2) to make them fully supported clients. However, just as Windows 8 there will be no support for Operating System Deployment.

Also from Technet:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/configmgrteam/archive/2013/09/16/support-questions-about-win-8.1-and-winsvr-2012-r2-for-configmgr-and-endpoint-protection.aspx

 Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 2

As with System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Service Pack 1, we are adding the following operating systems to our client support matrix in Configuration Manager 2007 with SP2 (includes Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and Configuration Manager 2007 R3):

• Windows 8.1 Pro
• Windows 8.1 Enterprise
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter

Note: Though these will be fully supported as clients, there is no plan to add support for deploying these as operating systems by using the Configuration Manager 2007 operating system deployment feature. Also, no site servers or site systems will be supported on any version of Windows Server 2012 R2.