Is it possible to use vPro Management Pack for Service Manager *without* SCCM?

[idata]

We are starting a small scale pilot of the vPro technologies, particularly AMT, so that we can compare the functionality against how some of our tasks are currently being carried out.

We are also starting to introduce Microsoft's System Center Service Manager as our new helpdesk tool so I was very interested in the release of the vPro Management Pack. However, the PDF that accompanies the management pack states:

"Intel Core vPro Processor enabled clients must be provisioned and manageable by System Center Configuration Manager 2007"

We haven't deployed that yet ... and I'm still waiting for budget approval to see if it will be deployed in 2011.

So far in the pilot, I have manually activated vPro using the tool that comes with SCS. I can confirm that vPro has been configured and we have used the 90-day trial of VNC Viewer Plus to confirm that we can remotely connect to such enabled devices.

However, attempts to use the tasks that get added by the Management Pack are failing. Neither the KVM task nor the power management tasks are succeeeding.

Are there any manual steps that we can take to appropriate set up the vPro clients or must it be done by SCCM?

Thanks.

[idata]

Technically, no, you don't need SCCM to use the vPro management pack for Service Manager. If you want to use it out-of-the-box so to speak you just need to provision AMT for Kerberos authentication and TLS support. It doesn't matter which solution you use to do the actual provisioning.