System Center Essentials - what is it?
System Center Essentials (or SCE, pronounced like "ski") is part of the System Center family of management solutions that helps you proactively plan, deploy, manage, and optimize your IT environment.
It's design to help in the management for customers with upto 500 computers and 30 servers. It will also have a remote management pack to allow partners to manage a customer's environment.
SCE combines the technology from Operation Manager 2007 (http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/opsmgr/default.mspx) which allows for end to end monitoring and deployment capability of windows update services for deployment.
From the SCE whitepaper:
However, we recognize that things are different in the IT world of midsize businesses. Many IT pains that midsize businesses experience are related to IT management and include troubleshooting end user problems, automating management tasks, managing multiple systems, and diagnosing and resolving IT problems. Most of these midsize organizations currently have to use a variety of tools to manage their IT environments. Most of these tools are “point” solutions rather than comprehensive management tools. Some of these tools are no more than re-packaged Enterprise IT management tools which can be complex and require a steep learning curve. Most IT professionals have little spare time to learn and take advantage of these Enterprise tools. The tools that are fairly easy to use tend to be narrow in scope and limited in functionality. Based on this type of customer and partner feedback, Microsoft is developing System Center Essentials 2007 (Essentials 2007), a proactive and unified management solution that enables IT professionals in midsize organizations to more efficiently secure, update, monitor and troubleshoot their IT environments. "
SCE will scale up to 500 desktops and 30 servers - so is very well positioned for Mid Market customers. The pricing won't be available until the release of the product - but it will be very competitive for this market. We're currently at RC1 - which can be downloaded from the system center web site - http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sce/default.mspx
After the release of SCE (estimate of H1 2007), there will be a Remote Management Services capability built into SCE. This will allows partners to manage customer environments. The partner (using Ops Manager) will have a dashboard view of the customer environment, topologies and see customer sites by computer and role. They can then administer servers, computers and management setttings over the internet.
For more information - refer to the SCE blog links or view the above web site.
