Earlier this week, nearly 25% of the 500 or so attendees listened in to the Microsoft Solution Provider Session at the Gartner ITAM Conference here in Orlando, Florida. We were honored to have two customer spokespeople participate in the hour long presentation entitled, “Best Practices for On Premises and Cloud Asset Management” helping make the session the best attended for the day.

The customer perspective shared by Dr. Joel Hartman, CIO and Vice Provost for IT and Resources for University of Central Florida and Kathy Porter, Manager, Vice President of IT Asset Management for U.S. Bank was invaluable in helping transform the theory of best practices into tangible, real world examples.

Microsoft Worldwide Licensing & Pricing (WWLP), together with colleagues from the Software Asset Management (SAM) team will be attending and presenting at the Gartner IT, Financial, Procurement & Asset Management Summit next week in Orlando, Florida.  In addition, we’re delighted to share that Microsoft is a Platinum Level sponsor for the event.  If you’re planning to attend, we will also have a booth presence with plenty of helpful staff to answer questions and share tips about useful resources around Microsoft licensing and software asset
management.

The new System Center monitoring pack for Windows Azure applications enables you to monitor the availability and performance of applications that are running on Windows Azure. Previously available as a release candidate, this new Operations Manager monitoring pack enables an integrated view into Windows Azure based applications running in your public cloud environment and can be leverage as part of License Mobility through Software Assurance. 

Download the release version of this monitoring pack here.

This week marks the official availability of the updated Core CAL Suite including Lync Server Standard CAL and Forefront Endpoint Protection. This update marks the first change to Core CAL since it was introduced nearly 10 years ago, and it enables the suite to deliver the essential capabilities that every user needs, and also aligns our largest on-premises suite with Windows Intune and Office 365.

Bringing cloud computing into your organization is often a gradual process; understanding one’s technology position is key to crafting a transition plan that works for your organization. The Solution Accelerator Team has a range of tools that can help in this regard and they introduced the latest version of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit (v6.0) in a recent blog post.