You can work with the baselines from Microsoft without making any changes. However, it is likely that you will need to customize one or more baselines to address your organization’s requirements. You cannot modify Microsoft baselines in SCM, but you can make baseline copies that you can then customize.

SCM includes information about hundreds of settings related to security and compliance that are available in Windows operating systems, Internet Explorer, and Office applications. Use the search features in SCM to find baseline settings that you want to customize, and evaluate them using Microsoft recommendations.

You can customize your baselines by adding, deleting, and moving settings. You also can use the Compare / Merge feature in SCM to further customize your baselines to meet the requirements of your organization. And you can use the Edit feature to update a custom baseline with either a major or minor version number, or a combination of these values, as illustrated in the following figure.

Description: C:\Users\johnc\Documents\Baselines 2.0\SCM 2.0 Help\SCM 2 Help development files\Screen shots\Edit_version_number_dialog_box.JPG

For information about how to use these features, see the Help topics "Customize baselines" and "Compare with Microsoft recommendations" in the "Customize knowledge" section.