To help our customers accelerate their testing and deployment of Windows 7, we are really pleased to announce an update to the ACT Connector for Configuration Manager.  The Application Compatibility Toolkit Connector (ACT Connector) assists administrators with collecting the necessary computer and application compatibility information to help plan for a Windows deployment.

With this connector update, Administrators will be able to utilize valuable Application Compatibility information right from within the Configuration Manager console.  The ACT Connector provides the following functionality within the Admin console:

• Inventories installed software applications and creates reports that will assist with determining which applications are Windows compatible.
• Retrieves device driver compatibility for installed devices and creates reports that will assist with determining which device drivers will need to be upgraded to support the Windows operating system.

The ACT Connector can be downloaded here.
Here are some additional resources:

• Configuration Manager Homepage
• Configuration Manager Techcenter
• Application Compatibility Toolkit documentation for ConfigMgr
• ACT documentation on TechNet

Have a great weekend!

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center

The Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 is the solution to allow your employees to safely use the Internet.  To assure that it is operating optimally, the Operations Management Pack for Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 – released earlier this month (version 7.0.7695.1) - includes monitors and rules to track the deployed topology & features, performance, availability, and reliability of Forefront TMG 2010.

With this management pack you can proactively manage your Forefront TMG 2010 deployment, enabling you to analyze performance trends and metrics, manage bottlenecks, and identify capacity requirements.  Some of the key features incorporated into the management pack include:

• Topology and feature deployment
• Events indicating service outages
• Alerts indicating configuration issues and connected data source changes
• Verification that all dependant services are running
• Configuration storage synchronization

Download the Operations Management Pack for Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 today!  For more information on System Center and Forefront, click the following links:

• Forefront TMG 2010
• Operations Manager 2007 R2

Customers still running the Microsoft Internet Security and Accelerator (ISA) Server can also monitor the health and performance of their environment with the following options:

• Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Management Pack for OpsMgr 2007 at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C576FCDF-42F0-4EB5-990D-E8E7C7E9C07E&displaylang=en&displaylang=en
• Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004 and 2006 Management Pack at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6BF3B468-0473-41A1-9EA1-F3BCEC7AA562&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Now available for download, the Operations Management Pack for Windows Server 2008 R2 Direct Access Server supports a rich set of Alarms, Monitors and Agent Tasks that can be used to successfully and efficiently manage a Direct Access server.

Through Operations Manager, the Direct Access Server Management Pack supports the following features:

• Automatic discovery of the Direct Access Server and its components, including:
  • IP-HTTPS Gateway
  • ISATAP Router
  • Network Security Component
  • 6to4 Router
  • Teredo Relay
  • Teredo Server
    
• Monitors that identify:
  • Status of Direct Access Server and its components
  • Denial of service (DoS), spoofing, and replay attacks
  • ICMP and data traffic queue overflows
  • Utilization of available IPsec states on the Direct Server

This new management pack can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center, or via the integrated MP Download wizard from our online service.

Sacha Dawes, CISSP
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center Solutions for Dynamic Datacenters

Yes, it really is an established day.  Check out http://dataprivacyday2010.org/:

This is a great day to think about “How private is your backup?”

System Center has some capabilities to support Data Privacy Day within Data Protection Manager. 

Check out our blog post on Because It’s Everybody’s Business to read the rest of our post.

Thanks for reading.

Jason Buffington Senior Technical Product Manager – System Center       System Center Data Protection Manager System Center Essentials

I wanted to get you guys a link to a very cool site, as we are seeing a lot of interest in providing data around how System Center can reduce your IT costs.  Check out this site, lots of interesting data from real customer engagements……

Kind regards

Jeff Wettlaufer 
Sr. Technical Product Manager
System Center