Greetings Service Manager fans! I’m really excited to blog about some of the cool new capabilities that are available as part of the release of Service Manager 2012 Beta , specifically the new Service Catalog and Service Request Management capabilities...

Hi All, We are extremely excited to announce the availability of the release candidates for System Center 2012 Configuration Manager and System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection (formerly known as Forefront Endpoint Protection 2012) today. Both releases...

I wanted to answer a question that’s come up a lot with customers over the last several months: How do business hours and maintenance windows differ or relate to each other in Configuration Manager 2012? To clarify this, I’ve provided some...

As announced on the Server and Cloud Platform Blog , System Center App Controller 2012 Beta is now available! App Co ntroller is a new member of the System Center family and provides a number of capabilities that enable Application Self Service across...

As part of the product management team for Windows Server & System Center, it’s been very energizing to see the excitement in the community around the 2012 releases of Windows Server and System Center. I just came back last week from conducting...

I’m Adam Carter, the technical product manager for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in Windows Server at Microsoft. VMware® recently published a datasheet about why you should choose VMware View™ over Remote Desktop Services (RDS)...

As we work on the System Center 2012 Configuration Manager release, I would like to share some of the improvements you can expect in the Administrator Console experience. While the emphasis is all about the new look and feel (yes, it’s not the Microsoft...

The last couple of weeks have been exciting times for those of us at Microsoft who have been working on Windows Server 2012, as we officially launched the product and made it broadly available to you, our customers. As part of our launch activities I’ve...

Today is a great day in my organization as we’re able to publically announce the release of Workflow Manager 1.0, which is now available for download . Workflow Manager 1.0 allows you to host and manage long-running Windows Workflow Foundation ...

We’re happy to announce that the Release Candidate of Operations Manager 2012 is now available! If you read our post on 10/27 about App Controller, Service Manager and Orchestrator, then you know cloud computing is making things much easier for...

I wanted to take a moment to share some thoughts from my co-worker, Brett, regarding the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference held last week and in particular about a new program we launched called the "Switch to Hyper-V" program. Check out what Brett...

Working in enterprise IT organizations here and at other companies has convinced me that applications are the lifeblood of any business. I used to be amazed at how quickly the CIO would get involved if a revenue generating application wasn’t performing...

On January 15th, Microsoft announced several new products and services that continue to drive momentum against our Cloud OS vision . In an accompanying blog post , Microsoft vice president Michael Park says that Microsoft is uniquely positioned to bring...

Dear Windows Server 2003, Ten years ago, Microsoft brought you into my life. You were new, fresh, interesting – the server OS of my dreams. You dramatically improved Active Directory to truly enable single sign-on within my enterprise, and introduced...

The System Center team is pleased to announce that the second community technology preview (CTP2) of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for download . Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate Microsoft’s Private Cloud is built...

My oldest son started high school this fall. As you can probably imagine, there was a bit of anxiety in our household in the days leading up to the start of school. After all, the first year of high school is a big milestone, and he didn’t know...

Yesterday brought good news for FreeBSD customers looking to adopt virtualization and move toward cloud computing. Microsoft, alongside partners NetApp and Citrix , announced the availability of FreeBSD support for Windows Server Hyper-V. This collaboration...

Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of System Center Advisor (formerly Microsoft codename ‘Atlanta’) enabling IT Professionals to proactively avoid server configuration problems by assessing static, runtime and operational...

My favorite migration feature within System Center 2012 Configuration Manager is Migration Distribution Point upgrade, which is the ability to perform an in-place upgrade of an existing Configuration Manager 2007 Distribution Point to a Configuration...

Two weeks ago we ushered in the era of the Cloud OS with the launch of Windows Server 2012. By now, we hope you’ve had a chance to watch the Built from the Cloud Up keynote videos , download a Windows Server 2012 evaluation and try your hand at...

In a previously published blog on enterprise application performance , we’ve talked about Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V’s ability to support your various tier-1 and 2 server application workloads in virtualized environments. The great news is...

At Microsoft we have the opportunity to test and operate our software platform in our own datacenters at scale by running over 200 cloud applications with some of the largest online services in the world such as Bing, Hotmail, Xbox Live, Windows Azure...

Configuration Manager 2012 is finally here! We are having a great time at MMS talking to everyone about the new features and functionality that they now have access to in the GA product. For those folks that couldn’t make it to the conference, I...

Gone are the days of file replication for the majority of data in Configuration Manager . While content for applications, packages and a small subset of discovery still use file replication, all the other information in Configuration Manager now uses...

Whether you’re talking about closet space in your house or the capacity of your datacenter, storage is something you can never have enough of. But storage space alone isn’t the whole story. Storage for data needs to be both flexible and reliable...