I’m pleased to announce that the new beta of System Center Service Manger is now available. This beta includes the updated infrastructure components that will both deliver the performance we are targeting for the release and support our objective of delivering an IT service desk that is tightly integrated with the rest of the System Center product family.

How to Get the Bits: You can access the beta on Microsoft Connect, where you will first need to fill out a nomination survey. Once you've completed the survey, you will see the Service Manager beta connections page, which provides links and instructions for downloading.

As a reminder the objectives of Service Manager are to deliver an IT service desk that provides:

• Built in service management best practices
• Simple customization and extensibility
• Common platform and workflows across System Center

You can download a whitepaper outlining the vision for Service Manager here.

Key capabilities available for testing in this beta release include:

• Administrative tasks such creating users and groups
• Change management activities such as creating and monitoring the progress of requests
• Creating and viewing configuration items (CIs)
• Editing incident notification templates or workflows
• Create incidents and editing the incident (and problem) workflow
• Integration with System Center Configuration Manager

We’re excited to make this beta available publically and will be delivering a second beta in the middle of 2009. Until then I hope you enjoy this important step on the journey to expand the System Center family to include a strong Service Desk capability

Visit the Connect site to download and start trying out Service Manager today.

Regards
Paul

The System Center Operations Manager team is excited to announce the availability of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta, which is ready for you to download through Microsoft Connect today!

As announced and demonstrated by Brad Anderson at TechEd EMEA 2008 earlier this month, Operations Manager 2007 R2 will deliver key new capabilities including cross-platform monitoring, service-level tracking, new and updated monitor templates (including process, OLE DB, NT Service, and Unix/Linux log file), and much more!

Downloading the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta

• If you registered for the Cross Cross Platform Extensions Beta, you can download the R2 Beta through that same program.
• Those new to the Betas should self-subscribe to the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta Connect program, which will automatically register you and give you access to the beta download, documentation and support newsgroups.

About Operations Manager 2007 R2

Operations Manager 2007 R2 introduces key new and enhanced functionality, including:

• Enhanced application performance and availability across heterogeneous platforms
• Delivers monitoring across Windows, Linux and Unix servers–all through a single console.
• Extends end to end monitoring of distributed applications to any workload running on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms.
• Maximize availability of virtual workloads with integration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

• Improved management of applications in the data center
• Delivers on the scale requirements of URL monitoring of your business.
• Meet agreed service levels with enhanced reporting showing application performance and availability.
• More efficient problem identification and action to resolve issues.

• Increased speed of access to information and functionality to drive management
• Faster console load times for views and results.
• Simplified identification and download of new and updated Management Packs through an integrated wizard.
• Faster identification of where Management Pack settings have been tuned using the new overrides summary view.
• Simplified notification setup and management.
• Improved and simplified management pack authoring experience.

The Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta integrates the functionality delivered with the Cross Platform Extensions Beta, which was originally made available at MMS 2008 in April.  Work also continues on the Interoperability Connectors (which enable the sharing of information between Operations Manager and other management systems), and new betas of these will become available in December through the Operations Manager R2 Connect program (we will announce through this blog and to those signed up to the R2 Beta accordingly).

More details can be found in this What's New & Improved in Operations Manager R2 Overview, or in the documentation found within the R2 Beta Connect program.  Additionally, the Operations Manager 2007 R2 page on TechNet will be updated later today with additional information and links to the download.

Support for the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta can be found through the following:

• For general questions on the Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta, please use the existing newsgroups at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/bb839593.aspx
• For questions relating to Cross Platform and the Interoperability Connectors, we are excited to launch the new forums available at:
• Cross Platform Monitoring - http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=604&SiteID=17
• Interoperability Connectors - http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=605&SiteID=17

We look forward to your evaluating this exciting new beta release, and hearing your feedback on the Operations Manager 2007 R2 beta.

Best regards,

Sacha Dawes (on behalf of the System Center Operations Manager team)
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

At IT Forum last week, the general public got a chance to see DPM 2007 Service Pack 1.

It isn't quite released yet, but still tracking really well for December.  So, to give everyone else a taste of what is in SP1 -- check out this video on EDGE.TECHNET.COM.   And look for a weekly podcast on Edge, each showing one new SP1 feature between now and the end of the year.

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Data-Protection-Manager-with-Jason-Buffington/

Podcast links will be available from the DPM Product Blog at blogs.technet.com/DPM and my blog, as well.

-- jason

Just want to let you know about some changes we're beginning to make in our TechNet site to help you find relevant community resources for System Center-related topics, both on Microsoft sites and off...

Contextualizing Social Bookmarks

Chris over at TechNet had approached me a little while back about the TechNet social bookmarking app, and we talked about how we could build awareness for it. Among other things, it seemed that an obvious starting point would be to build a feed of System Center-related community bookmarks into our TechNet TechCenter (which you'll find both on the home page and on the Community tab).

I encourage you to check out the bookmarking app and add in a few of your own bookmarks--whatever favorite resources you might have related to System Center (just be sure to use the "system center" tag, as indicated). This also afforded an opportunity to, at long last, add in blog and forum feeds (which you can import into your favorite RSS reader using the available OPML). Thanks to Mike, who is our TechCenter site manager, we now have what I hope you will agree is a more useful community page.

Toward Community Feed Integration

Eventually, too, I would like to include third-party community feeds: just need the content, and then we can build out a page that exposes some of the resources and key contributors in the community on TechNet. Wanted to include a "System Center"-tagged Twitter feed, but unfortunately, we're not technically enabled to display Atom-based feeds. (Could someone please pummel the folks over at Twitter and insist they also include RSS in their output? Sheesh.)

New Edge Portal

And over on TechNet Edge, I'd like to draw your attention to a new portal for System Center-related videos that we created. Perhaps, in time, we will build a presence out on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, but for now I'm just trying to figure out how to resource this kind of activity for the long run.

Future Feed Capabilities

And, finally, before too long, I hope to have the ability to build such features, appropriately configured, into our pre-sales sites on MSCOM; it's just a question of having a site component that permits the subscription and display of external RSS sources (something I've wanted longer than I'd care to remember).

As always, tell us what you think of these ideas, and if you have any others, especially where it involves the incorporation of various RSS sources of value to the community, please do let me know.... The thread is open!

- dave //

For those of you planning migration or upgrade activities, the Solution Accelerator team this week released the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 3.2.  Details and download information can be found in their blog post linked here and below is a brief summary:

Introducing Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit

MAP is a scalable and agent-less assessment platform designed to make it easier for you to adopt the latest Microsoft technologies. In this version, MAP has expanded its assessment capabilities to include SQL Server 2008, Forefront/NAP, and Microsoft Online Services migration, as well as providing a Power Savings assessment to help you “go green.”

In summary, MAP 3.2 assessment areas now include:

•                    SQL Server Database Instance Discovery (NEW!)

•                    Microsoft Online Services Needs Assessment and Survey (NEW!)

•                    Forefront Client Security/NAP Readiness Assessment (NEW!)

•                    Power Savings Calculator (NEW!)

•                    Virtualization Infrastructure Assessment (e.g. reporting the mapping of hosts by guests) (NEW!)

•                    Windows Server 2008 Hardware Assessment

•                    Server Consolidation Reports and Proposals (Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005 R2)

•                    Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 Hardware Assessment

•                    Desktop Security Assessment to determine if desktops have anti-virus and anti-malware programs installed and up-to-date, or if the Windows Firewall is turned on

Enjoy - Larry