I recently attended a smallish conference in Scottsdale, AZ, hosted by MarketingProfs, called the Digital Marketing Mixer. Now, granted, this event has little to do with the System Center business directly, but it does have a bearing on the ways in which we choose to engage our audience (that's you) in talking about System Center.

The main point of the event was to bring marketers up to speed on some of the latest trends in marketing (you know, the stuff we do to get you on board w/ our brand and hopefully, somewhere down the line, actually buy or convince others to buy our products to solve your problems in IT). My interest was in the social media track, which treated things like Twitter, blogging, videocasting, and the like. Overall, the sessions were light on some of the detail and analysis I might want, but to some extent, that's a measure of the newness of the discipline. Much of the value was in the open discussions among the attendees, where people would share their problems and best practices, and generally try to get a better sense of what this was all about.

Anyway, there's much more I could say about it, but I mainly just want to let you know how we're taking a look at new ways to engage w/ you--as our increasing emphasis on our informal videos on TechNet Edge might attest--and hope you'll join with us in a conversation about that. A few questions I'd love to delve into with you:

• As an IT pro or IT manager/decision maker, do you use social media tools such as Twitter to get your job done, and if so, which ones?
• Are there enough of you interested in using social media tools to justify our investing in them and putting more energy into engaging with you through them?

My feeling is that this is the stuff of the future, and what little I know about IT pros suggests to me that this is an obvious way for us to go, in part because this is much less about focus group-tested messages and in-your-face marketing on the Web and in print, and much more so about building personal/professional connections with our audience. I'm shown again and again that you just want the facts, man, including better resources to help you get your job done and the most out of, e.g., System Center, and without any distracting nonsense to try to "sell" you on anything.

Am I right?

As you ponder those questions, check out this System Center tweets feed. And, give us a hand and do some TechNet bookmarking out there--just be sure to do use the "system center" tag. Your items will show up in our TechCenter very soon (we've got a few community-focused revisions in the works).

- dave //

Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has been released! Microsoft's much-awaited update to VMM 2007 helps bring home the reality of physical-to-virtual machine management, playing a key role in the System Center suite of products and solutions for the data center.

• Visit the VMM site for the latest content.
• Read the semi-official announcement from Zane.
• Get a rundown of the key features and what they can do for IT implementers in this post from Rakesh.
• And, don't forget to download the eval edition.

- dave //

I'm pleased to annouce that System Center Operations Manager 2007 has received another award - this time from SQL Server Magazine Editors' Best Community Choice awards. The product picked up the gold award for Exchange Server Monitoring tool. We're especially proud of this becuase of the broad cross sction of opinion that drives the decision making for these awards.

As part of our overall data center management solutions, Operations Manager is really making a difference in the cost of managing a range of applications and services, while at the same time improving availabilty. Look out for more resources on the role System Center plays in the data center in the coming months.

Cheers

Paul

In conversations with customers and partners,  most organizations running SharePoint are now considering running it on virtualized servers. Last week, Michael Noel, partner at Convergent Computing – a Microsoft Gold Partner and SharePoint MVP, sat down with me to talk about running SharePoint components virtually. Specifically, he provides his thoughts and experience on what SharePoint components you might want to run virtually – and when.  Michael also authored a recently released paper, Virtualization of SharePoint Technologies and Products, for more information on the topic.

Running SharePoint Products and Technologies Virtually

While we had Michael in Redmond, we talked on several points about management of the SharePoint environment; management of virtual machines, data protection and disaster recovery, and the role of knowledge in monitoring. We'll post them here and on TechNet Edge over the next few weeks. A big thanks to Michael for spending this time and sharing his insights with us.

Kelly

Earlier this week, I sat down with our friends at Total Wine to talk about how they are using System Center.  

It's one of the first times that I've gotten to talk about technology and 'wine' instead of 'whine" - so check out the TechNet Radio interview where we covered:

SC Data Protection Manager - replacing previous backup solutions that were unreliable and making backups 'fun'

SC Virtual Machine Manager - as the Total Wine Hyper-V deployment continues rolling out

SC Operations Manager - as the nerve center of all of TW's Microsoft and in-house applications

SC Configuration Manager - for deploying everything from new applications to replacement servers in remote stores

The audio shows 1 hour, but only the first 22 minutes are System Center with Total Wine - the rest is a Microsoft TechNet October Security Bulletins.

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To learn more about Total Wines uses System Center - check out the Microsoft case study.

Our sincere thanks to Todd Slan and Robert DeSantos at Total Wine for allowing Microsoft System Center to partner with them in helping them manage the Total Wine infrastructure.

-- Jason