You may or may not have noticed it yet, but the System Center Catalog has been transitioned over to Microsoft Pinpoint, which should be your first stop to find out about all the different management packs, connectors, extensions and applications available from Microsoft and its partners for System Center. 

Through Microsoft Pinpoint you can search for extensions and add-ons for Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager, Virtual Machine Manager, and Essentials, and the catalog will continue to be updated as new and updated solutions become available.

The transition to Microsoft Pinpoint is thanks to a number of different people in the System Center marketing and product groups, so our thanks to them, and we all hope that you enjoy the new interface and find exactly what you’re looking for!  Check it out at your earliest opportunity!

[As a side note, this is possibly the last post to this blog for 2009 (at least, US Pacific Time), so Happy New Year and here’s to a great 2010 to all our readers!]

Sacha

Sr. Technical Product Manager | System Center Product Management

Good morning (again) there seems to be a lot to share from the feeds and inbox this AM.  In case any of you are ‘feet-up’ by the fire and thinking about the next 12 months of events, I wanted to pop a short list of events we in the System Center team are trying to attend.  No promises, but we have these on our radar and hope we can see you somewhere soon!

	TechDays Finland Helsinki, March 9-10, 2010 Event site and registration information here
	TechDays Sweden Stockholm March 23-24th, 2010 Event site and registration information here
	TechDays Belgium Antwerp March 30-31, April 1 2010 Event site and registration information here
	Microsoft Management Summit 2010 Las Vegas, Nevada April 19-23, 2010 Event site and registration information here
	TechEd North America New Orleans, LA June 7-10, 2010 Event site and registration information here
	Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) Washington D.C. July 12-15 2010 Event site and registration information here
	This is a great resource for all events, and is where (if you are subscribed) you can see decks, event recordings etc.

Do you know of an event that isn't listed (I am sure there are a few).  Let me know?  There are some that don’t have sites up yet, like the TechEd’s in Australia and New Zealand, Africa, India, Japan.

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Happy Holidays everyone, we got some really exciting news this morning.  The System Center and Windows 7 Technet Edge video recently recorded with Brad Anderson, CVP recorded the highest single month viewership, 29278, in EDGE history.

This means a few things.  First – you guys are really interested in Windows 7 and System Center.  This type of interest shows you guys are looking for content on how to get Windows 7 and System Center rolling now.  Well, we are listening.  We have just recorded some new Windows 7 System Center videos and demos, and understanding the holidays are here, we should be able to get them online pretty quickly. 

Thanks for your time, and for visiting the site.  From the System Center team, I would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season, and many successes in 2010.  

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

Some of our friends in the community have in the past year made use of a Vista desktop gadget that we put together to send out news and announcements. Because of expense in maintaining the gadget and its feed, we've decided to decommission it, effective January 15, 2010.

But all is not lost! As a replacement, we would like to encourage members of the community to take advantage of the Vista/Windows 7 desktop RSS reader (check out this resource on the Windows site for help on how to use it)—or any other desktop RSS reader application that you prefer--and simply add to it one or more of the following RSS feeds:

• System Center (General): http://www.microsoft.com/feeds/technet/en-us/systemcenter/systemcenter_only.xml
• Configuration Manager: http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/configmgr_feature
• Operations Manager: http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/opsmgr_feature
• Data Protection Manager: http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/dpm_feature
• Virtual Machine Manager: http://services.social.microsoft.com/feeds/feed/scvmm_feature
• System Center Essentials: http://www.microsoft.com/feeds/technet/en-us/sce/sce-featured.xml
• System Center TechNet Edge Videos: http://edge.technet.com/Tags/System+Center/RSS/
• System Center Team Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/systemcenter/rss.xml
• System Center on Twitter: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/37764753.rss

We will be adding to this list of feeds in the months ahead—periodically check back on this blog for updates.

Gracias | Merci | Danke | etc.

- dave //

Hey everyone, recently Michael Niehaus recorded a video demonstration of how to deploy Windows 7 using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2.  I wanted to get you guys the link to the video, it’s about 10 minutes long but well worth the time.

Bookmark this on Delicious   

For more information about Windows 7 Deployment, check out the following links.

Windows 7 Deployment content
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit – link
System Center Configuration Manager OS Deployment information

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center