Learning System Center 2012 R2

My apologies for the radio silence.  I'm currently heads-down and slogging through Microsoft System Center.  This is an interesting beast.  The key to learning it seems to be that you have to dive right into the middle of it.  There is no logical starting point.  It is a multi-headed Hydra like Office with more than a half-dozen moving parts inside it.

So far I'm touching

• SC Operations Manager (monitoring) 
• SC Configuration manager (Deployment and Maintenance)  
• SC Orchestrator (Automation)
• SC Service Desk (Change Management & Ticketing)

This is no small task to learn.

I read the MS Press Introducing Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Technical Overview book and it wasn't a lot of help.  It has a big cloud emphasis, but not a lot of "To do X, you need Y".  The ebook is free at O'Reilly Publishing
http://search.oreilly.com/?q=introducing+microsoft+system+center+2012+r2

Back to the salt mines
-ellie