Put simply, literally just a handful of customers will be opting to install System Center Configuration Manager Long-Term Service Branch.
For 99% of the rest of us, Current Branch is the install base that should be chosen. It’s where the action is at.
A recent Enterprise Mobility blog post on TechNet Blogs, described the Current Branch (CB) and Long-Term Service Branch (LTSB) ‘servicing’ models:
If I was to have to distil a one-liner to describe LTSB it’d have to be “LTSB is for down-grading due to SA expiration, and for environments that need the current Windows 10 LTSB and ConfigMgr LTSB to remain static for a decade”.
Notable points about LTSB:
- There will be no updates at all for this servicing model
- 10 years of patch support
- No commitments from the Product Group to maintain this servicing model
- No Cloud technology at all, most fun bling has been stripped out
- Windows 10 LTSB as of now are supported, all future Windows 10 LTSB not supported
- Your Software Assurance agreement has expired, and you need to roll back to a version of System Center Configuration Manager that you do have support for, the previous option was to roll back to ConfigMgr 2012 R2, you can now roll back to ConfigMgr LTSB
- Obviously the product servicing model has been yanked out
David James the director of engineering for ConfigMgr recently tweeted showing what the choice should be:
And Kim Oppalfens sums it all up quite nicely here:
When it comes time to install ConfigMgr, practically almost all of you will be selecting Current Branch, the only time you’d choose LTSB is to monkey around with it for a look in the lab, unless you are one of those 1% (possibly even less!) of customers that truly need LTSB.
