With the launch of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange, System Center has been building a collection of stories with our friends in the different product groups.  Its exciting to see the efforts of everyone on our team light up with the launch efforts.  We wanted to show you how you can see the System Center content on the official launch site. 

1. Browse to the official launch site, ‘The New Efficiency’
2. At the lower center, select the link, ‘Explore the Event’
3. You will see some orange boxes pop up.  Select the ‘Microsoft Expo’
4. When this fires up, you will see the System Center logo. 
5. Follow the logo, and once you are in the System Center area, there are videos, demonstrations and other forms of collateral to enjoy. 

In this site you will see how System Center improves the experience of Windows and Exchange, driving efficiency, lowering costs, and improving security.  In an economy that is significantly different from even a couple of years ago,  IT shops find themselves ‘with less’ having to ‘do more’ .  But, those same pressures exist that have always been there.

System Center plays an ever increasing role in the story.  Merging systems management with security, compliance, mobility, and then trying at the same time to drive indirect savings in areas like productivity.  All of these things hammer the IT department constantly, pressure from the board room down, and from the users inward.  It’s a tough spot to be in, but that’s System Center’s sweet spot.  Right in the middle, quietly automating tasks, providing structure and framework technology to deliver what the organization needs.

I would really encourage you to spend a few minutes in the launch site and check out what we mean when System Center defines the term ‘the new efficiency’ in relation to exciting new products like Windows 7, Windows Server and Exchange.  We hope that you see some things that interest you, and keep checking back for more details on our integration efforts.

For those a little more interested in some hands on experiences, we have a few new TechNet Labs to work through.  These are:

TechNet Virtual Lab: Integrating Application Virtualization into Configuration Manager 2007 R2
TechNet Virtual Lab: Integrating SQL Server Reporting Services into Configuration Manager 2007 R2
TechNet Virtual Lab: Generating Asset Intelligence Data with Configuration Manager 2007
TechNet Virtual Lab: Determining Client Health in Configuration Manager 2007 R2

We also have some new TechNet webcasts coming up – these are:

TechNet Webcast: Asset Intelligence with Configuration Manager 2007 (Level 300)
TechNet Webcast: Automating Windows 7 Deployments Using System Center Configuration Manager (Level 300)
What’s New in Configuration Manager 2007 R2 SP2 and R3
Accelerating the migration from Windows XP to Windows 7

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

We are pleased to announce the beta release of the next generation of System Center Essentials!

SCE 2010 is designed specifically for mid-sized organizations and delivers a unified physical and virtual IT management experience.

It enables you to better secure, update, monitor, and troubleshoot from a single console, so you can efficiently and proactively manage your IT environment:

• A unified solution with a single console for managing your physical and virtual servers, client computers, hardware, software, and IT services
• Smart alert notifications of IT issues, providing expert diagnostic information to accelerate problem diagnosis and quickly resolve issues before they cause downtime
• Simplify complex management tasks, like creation of virtual servers, software deployment, update management, and inventory collection
• And designed to be easy to deploy and maintain, exclusively for mid-sized organizations

For more information, check out the SCE Team Blog.

So, please download the beta for yourself, and let us know what you think!

And look for our TechNet Webcast next month on        “What is new in System Center Essentials 2010” Jason Buffington Sr. Technical Product Manager blogs.technet.com/jbuff

We are pleased to announce the beta release of the next generation of System Center Data Protection Manager !

There are lots of reasons to be excited about DPM 2010.  Here are a few:

• Virtualization folks get item-level restore from within VM backups, as well as support for LiveMigration (CSV) scenarios for Hyper-V R2
• SharePoint folks lose the need for a Recovery Farm and gain auto-protection of new content databases
• SQL Server administrators get auto-protection at a SQL instance level, huge scalability increases and a self-service restore utility for DBAs
• Exchange managers get support for Exchange 2010, including DAG configurations, as well as CCR/SCR
• Windows client users get protection and recovery for remote laptops, with protection online and offline
• Disaster Recovery planners get lots of new options around multi-site chaining and protection between sites
• And everyone gets new enterprise scalability, reliability and manageability enhancements

For more information, check out these resources:

What is new in DPM 2010 on www.microsoft.com/DPM

The DPM product team blog on the 2010 beta release

The DPM product manager’s blog (mine)

So, please download the beta for yourself, and let us know what you think!

And don’t miss my TechNet Webcast on October 8 – Technical Introduction to DPM 2010 Jason Buffington Sr. Technical Product Manager blogs.technet.com/jbuff

An email just fluttered into my inbox today that caught my eye, from Jason Buffington, one of our technical product managers, calling attention to a great blog post from one of our customers in the community. Basically, the customer was grateful for receiving direct help from the DPM crew at Microsoft on a problem he was having:

I had a problem.   A major problem.  

It was a report of all things.   The application was working fine but the output from one report wasn’t the way we needed it.

So I went to the blogs and submitted a simple statement

“HELP ME OBIWAN, YOU’RE MY ONLY HOPE!”

Or something along those lines.

So instead of getting a generic response like.  “We thank you for your request.  A representative of some type will examine your comments and smugly ignore them…”

I got a human.  Within minutes.

Listen clearly folks.  Microsoft LISTENS.   To the GOOD and the BAD.

The main point I took from Jason’s message is: when Microsoft is engaged in the community, responding to the needs of the community as human beings helping other human beings, it’s the kind of effort that is repaid tenfold in goodwill and good PR.

Complaint as Invitation

I should say a word or two about the bit about our listening to the “GOOD and the BAD.” The point isn’t that Microsoft wants only praise, and wants to ignore or stifle the blame (much less that we are listening in some kind of Big Brother way). In fact, complaints offered in earnest are really the best kind of invitation to dialogue, because they provide an opportunity for both addressing an issue directly and making a dissatisfied customer happy, and learning how to make better products in the future so that all customers my have a better experience. Even in the former, case, though, helping one customer solve his or her problem through online forums, blogs, etc., usually means that many other customers out in the community can benefit, too.

Limits of Individual Heroics

I may be stating the obvious. But I think it’s also important to recognize the true limits of this approach, which is often underscored by a natural hesitancy of folks within Microsoft for engaging in this fashion with the community because of what obligations it might entail—that is to say, that individual efforts among several thousand at Microsoft can only go so far, since we are all constantly pulled in multiple directions at once and our time for direct customer engagement is severely limited. Our ability to sustain these kinds of efforts usually meets with the harsh realities of project deadlines and fiscal constraints, and the day-to-day grind of email, sync meetings, and status reports. So how do we figure out how to scale? How can we can we engage in real, sustainable dialogue and relationship building with our customers?

Programmatic Approaches

The best answer I could come up with is through programs that facilitate connections but in a limited fashion, that can grow in time as our budgets and resources permit, and that get help and touch where they can do the most good, in the hands of active and influential people in the community who are motivated (altruistically or otherwise) to give to their peers the knowledge and expertise, tips and tricks they have at their disposal. Hence the Microsoft MVP Program, long recognized as an industry standard.

And hence, too, our fledgling program in support of a wider community of influencers pertinent to our business, the System Center Influencers Program (soon to be reconfigured to embrace virtualization topics and communities, as well). While we’ve got a ways to go yet in developing the program, with each step that we take I become increasingly convinced that it can work; but it will require continual input and creative experimentation to find just the right mix of activities and assets that works for our audience and the community, and serve to benefit our business by driving improved customer satisfaction, among other things.

And this, too, is a communal effort: to find the right mix, we need the input of the people we’re trying to engage. We don’t just want to put content online or programs in place and hope that they manage to stick—we want to put what we think will work in place and then work with our intended audience to iterate and improve, and build offerings that really do correspond usefully to the needs of the community.

If you are interested in the System Center Influencers Program, please contact scnetsup@microsoft.com and tell us a little bit about who you are and why you want to join. We’ll get back to you promptly.

- dave //

I regularly hear from customers that one of the biggest challenges (and costs) they face in server and datacenter management is compliance. It just seems to take a lot of time and effort to make a compliant environment a reality. (This is clearly part of the overall cost of a high degree of manual datacenter management) While external and internal compliance requirements are nothing new, datacenter expansions, virtualization, and the focus on operational budgets has brought this thorny subject back to the center of attention.

I recently sat down with our friend Dwayne Melancon from Tripwire, who are experts in compliance management, to discuss the state of the relationship between those who set compliance requirements and policies, and those of us on the operational side who have to actually make these policies are reality. While the relationship might not be exactly be perfect, we hope that the integration of System Center with Tripwire can be one part of the solution to operationalize compliance in a cost effective manner.

You can also learn more about the integration of System Center and Tripwire here.

Cheers--

Paul Ross, Sr. Product Manager