I am very excited to be able to post this article, welcoming System Center Orchestrator to the System Center suite!

As was communicated by Brad Anderson in Tuesday’s MMS keynote and on the Nexus news bulletin, System Center Orchestrator is the official name for what we have been referring to previously as Opalis vNext.

Orchestrator which will be part of the System Center 2012 releases will provide a number of new features, functions and capabilities in addition to being rebranded and the codebase being moved into the Microsoft organization.

There will be a lot of information posted over the coming weeks and months as we build to the Beta in a few months and the Final release expected later this year, however I wanted to provide a summary level list here.

• IT Pro - Authoring, Debugging & Scripting
  • The Opalis product will be rebranded to System Center Orchestrator. We are working very hard to ensure that your existing investments in Opalis are maintained.
  • A new PowerShell provider to allow Orchestrator to be integrated into scripts and provide a mechanism for remote execution of runbooks.
• Operator - Trigger, Monitor &Troubleshoot
  • A new silverlight based dynamic web console to provide an easy way to start, monitor and investigate runbooks.
• Developer - Application integration
  • A new rich OData based web service that exposes Orchestrator functionality and information in a standards based way.
• IT Business Manager - Report & Analyze
  • A new mechanism for connecting your existing reporting investments to Orchestrator to extract, report and analyze what is happening inside Orchestrator.

In addition to the above investment areas, we are also completing a number of ‘housekeeping’ functions:

• A new Installer experience
• An Orchestrator Management Pack for Operations Manager
• Globalization of the Orchestrator release (Localization will follow in a future release)
• Updated versions of the Integration Packs, both for System Center as well as a number of the 3rd Party IP’s

As I mentioned above, we will be posting a lot of information about Orchestrator over the coming weeks and months.  We are ramping up our early adopter TAP program at the moment, and later in the year we will be running a full Public Beta so you can all take the new functionality for a spin

Keep an eye out for further information in the near future, and in the mean time, you can keep up with all the information by following @SC_Orchestrator on twitter or by using the #SCOrch tag.

And as always, I welcome any feedback you have.

•    Adam Hall
•    Snr. Technical Product Manager
•   

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