One of the coolest parts of evangelizing a product on behalf of Microsoft is discovering other folks in the IT community that are passionate about the same technologies that I am.

Last week, at MMS 2010, I had the opportunity to meet a System Center Influencer named Mike Resseler.  

Mike is an active member of the System Center Users Group in Belgium who has been really vocal about his excitement of DPM 2010:

Twitter : @MikeResseler

Personal Blog : http://scug.be/blogs/mike/

DPM Blog : http://scug.be/blogs/SCDPM/

While Mike and I have bantered in email and twitterspace, we hadn’t met until the System Center Influencers’ mixer at MMS last week – which was great to put a face and a handshake with a name.  

For the rest of the DPM 2010 fans out there, please give a shout or tweet of thanks out to Mike, because … he sat through, transcribed and blogged all 5 of the DPM 2010 sessions at MMS 2010:

MMS 2010 – BB12 – Technical Introduction to DPM 2010

MMS 2010 – BB13 – Protecting Applications with DPM 2010

MMS 2010 – BB14 – Protecting Windows Clients with DPM 2010

MMS 2010 – BB15 – Virtualization and Data Protection, better together with DPM 2010

MMS 2010 – BB37 – Disaster Recovery and Advanced Scenarios with DPM 2010

His notes (even capturing some of my bad jokes and puns) and screenshots are so thorough that I probably should just drop them in the speakers’ notes for each of the 5 PPTs.

Mike – it was truly a pleasure to meet you.  And on behalf of the System Center DPM team, thank you so much for your partnership!

Easily, the 2nd most common question that I hear regarding DPM 2010 is:

How do I upgrade to DPM 2010 RTM ?

The most common question is “when will it be available”, to which I reply:

• Evaluation is available now at DPM 2010 Evaluation Software
• Full Packaged Product will be available by June 1st when DPM 2010 is added to the MS Price List
• And the downloadable ISOs for MVLS, TechNet, etc. are coming in in May, as each portal queues them up.  And yes, I will blog/tweet about them as they come online.

But, back to the upgrade question. 

My friends in the DPM development team have done a really nice job of creating an “Upgrade Advisor” for DPM 2010.  It is an Excel spreadsheet where you can fill in what version that you are coming from (DPM 2007 SP1) and what version that you want to go to (DPM 2010 RTM EVAL), as well as what you are using for Disaster Recovery, Tape Library Sharing, etc.  And it outputs a checklist to walk you through the upgrade process.

Click here to download the DPM 2010 Upgrade Advisor.

As always, thanks for reading.

It is hard to imagine that today has finally arrived.   It has been so long in the making, and yet it seems like time flew by.

For my friends who may not be as geeky as me – today is the day that we announced that the next generation of both products that I manage has been Released To Manufacturing (RTM), meaning that they are finished building.  So, now we just start making downloads available, burning DVD’s and printing boxes.  Customers will be able to download the evaluation versions of the products by the end of today and start getting ready to purchase and deploy throughout May.

Check out the official blog announcing the RTM of both products.

Also, my favorite wingman and product marketing manager, weighed in on the launches at the Because It’s Everybody’s Business website.

It is hard to imagine that a year ago, I had barely put my hands on SCE 2007 (had been using the SC enterprise products instead) … and now I am soooo proud and excited to be a part of a really special gem within the System Center family.  It takes all of the enterprise goodness from the System Center management products and right-sizes them for midsized IT.   It has many of characteristics that first made me interested in DPM many years ago, around bringing enterprise technology to midsized orgs.  Having grown up with channel resellers and consulting at SMBs, this has always been a passion of mine.

Here are a few of my favorite features in SCE 2010:

Unified UI and workflows – the SCE development team really built a truly special UI that brings so many technologies together in one screen.  There is sooo much power that all seem to be one hyperlink away.

Virtualization Management – having virtualization truly integrated alongside software deployment and systems monitoring is awesome.  SCE provides easy to use wizards for establishing a new virtualization host, deploying a new virtual machine, converting a physical server to a virtual one, or even migrating from a VM from VMware to Hyper-V

Software Deployment – I did not used to be a ‘management guy’ … but software deployment and updates really are too easy with SCE.  I cannot imagine managing computers any other way.

You can read more about the 2010 release on the SCE Product Team blog or SCE website.

Most of you know that I joined Microsoft 4.5 years ago, to be part of DPM.  Having come from companies like Cheyenne(CA) ARCserve and Double-Take Software, as well as having been a Seagate/Veritas reseller, I knew that a Windows backup solution from Microsoft would change how customers backed up Windows.  Well, I joined the System Center team when DPM 2006 (version 1) had been in market for about a month.  Today culminates 4.5 years and 3 generations of DPM.  And like any good movie trilogy, this one completes the story that I wanted to tell.  DPM 2010 really is what I imagined a Microsoft solution for Windows would be.

Here are a few of my favorite features in DPM 2010:

Windows Client protection – while you are offline (to your local disk) or online (to the DPM server) in a seamless experience.

Microsoft Application protection – there are some great enhancements for SQL Server (self-service restore, auto-protection of databases, scale), as well as good stuff for Exchange and SharePoint – especially enterprise scale such as a single DPM server protecting 2,000 SQL databases, 40TB Exchange datasets, 25TB SharePoint farms with 1M items.

Virtualization protection – DPM truly lines up as THE way to back up Hyper-V, including LiveMigration/CSV support, item level recovery from VM backups, and alternate host restore

You can read more about the 2010 release on the DPM Product Team blog or DPM website.

This will be a busy two weeks at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2010 and Convergence … and then I can re-focus from ‘launch’ to ‘helping folks be successful evaluating and deploying’ these products.

They’re here !!   They’re here !!

Here in DPM land, we are always excited to hear when an expert customer or partner is able to leverage our technology in new ways.

One of our System Center Influencers has figured out how to back up the Internet itself.   We’re not exactly sure how, because I thought we cut that feature early in the beta process – but he has somehow got it working again.

To find out more, check out Ronnie's blog post.

If you have found other interesting implementations for DPM 2010, please let us know – April 1 or any other day of the year.