New Exchange 2007 Management Pack for Ops Mgr 2007 R2 Available!

[Updated June 17th: Corrected comment on Ops Mgr 2007 R2 trial length - is 180 days, not 160.  Thanks Cleber!] 

Utilizing some of the new capabilities in Operations Manager 2007 R2, such as PowerShell hosting and new monitoring templates, the new Exchange 2007 MP for Operations Manager 2007 R2 is now available for download from the System Center Catalog, as well as via the new web-service catalog from which Ops Mgr 2007 R2 can download MPs.

To highlight some of the key enhancements of this MP over its predecessors:

• Full, native implementation of the management pack, leveraging the latest capabilities offered in Ops Mgr 2007 R2, (e.g., basing health rollups on factors such as synthetic transactions, not just on component health, enabling alerting and response based on end-user impact).
• 60% reduction in noise-based alerts, enhanced by allowing the user to enable only the monitors and alerts that they require (as opposed to delivering the MP with all monitors turned on, whether needed or not).
• Integration with the Exchange BPA, providing a summary alert for deviations per Exchange Server.
• New wizard-driven monitoring templates simplify the ability to create synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Service, POP3 and/or IMAP.
• Visualization of synthetic transactions, allow rapid identification of where issues exist.
• Over 30 new/enhanced availability and performance reports against Service Level Objectives help identify alignment of service delivery against service targets.
• Full support for Microsoft Clustered configurations.

Note that this MP is designed to work on Ops Mgr 2007 R2, the RTM of which we announced in May 2009 (see details here).  Customers can download a 180-day, fully functional trial of Ops Mgr 2007 R2 today.

Sacha