System Center 2012 Configuration Manager Unleashed

Configuration Items and Baselines

You configure compliance by creating two object types:

• Configuration items: A collection of settings, values, and criteria that defines what is compared, checked, or evaluated on a target system.

• Configuration baselines: This is a grouping of multiple configuration items. Configuration items must be part of a configuration baseline to be assigned for evaluation on a collection of systems.

Instances of these two object types are often called configurations collectively because they define a specific system configuration.

Microsoft built compliance settings knowing that every IT environment is unique and that configuration standards and requirements in each IT environment are different. Thus, compliance settings ...