NewToSCCM

One more thing. Is there a way to confirm that a change in an existing policy has been picked up and applied within the System Center (i.e without having to go to the Endpoint)?

Thank you very much. Great response. I appreciate it.

This is a really great guide and it's allowed me to get up and running with an evaluation (unlike Microsoft's own documentation). I'm trying to test the different features of Endpoint Protection to understand the features' behaviour. For example, I've tried to switch off real-time protection on one endpoint to see how long it takes for the endpoint to pick up the new policy. For most vendors (McAfee, Kaspersky) the change is instant but here it seems to take an inordinately long time. Any ideas how I can push the policy to the client and how to determine that the change has been successfully applied? Thanks in advance :-)