Words and Software : Microsoft

SQL MP guide updated

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:45:00 GMT

I recently mentioned that we're changing how MP guides are released. The SQL Server Management Pack is the first to take advantage of the new system by making an update to the guide without repackaging the management pack .msi. Just download the .doc to get the latest guide - no need to download the .msi again (the MP hasn't changed).

Visual Basic 2008 Express: Build a Program Now! sample files

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:04:00 GMT

I decided to try to learn Visual Basic, so I picked up a book that looked promising: Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! I've been working through the chapters. In chapter 6, (adding a splash screen) it instructs you to replace the default icon with one from the companion files for the book.

Time to go out and install them, so I flip back to the start of the book to the instructions. The book says to download them from http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/companion/9780735625419. Dead link. I did a search, it pointed me to that same URL. Fortunately, search also surfaced a discussion thread where someone else was hunting for this download and someone else replied "Look here and click the "Companion Content" tab!".

So I thought I'd share.

R2: check for MP updates

Jeanie Decker — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:35:00 GMT

There hasn't been an easy way to check for management pack updates in Operations Manager 2007 until the R2 release. Once you're running R2, you can use the Import Management Packs wizard to determine if any of the MPs you are running have had an update released. Just follow the instructions on How to Import a Management Pack, and in step 4, be sure to select Updates available for management packs that are already imported on this computer.

Submit questions for the Operator's Manual

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:14:00 GMT

There are two ways to approach content on using the Operations console and Web console for Operations Manager:

Explain what information is available in each section of the consoles.
Take examples of information that an operator would want to locate, and tell them how to find it in the consoles.

I've decided to do it both ways, in a guide that I'm putting together for new Ops Mgr operators. Here are a few questions for #2 that I harvested from an email discussion:

I have added a Management Group in the console and I also added few computers, how do I know if these computers belong to the management group that I added?
How do I know if a management pack is applied or connected to the servers that I added in the console?

What other questions might an operator want to answer in the console? Submit your suggestions to jdecker AT microsoft DOT com!

Is your IE8 slow to open a new tab?

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:44:00 GMT

Whenever I would open a new tab in IE8, whether by control-clicking a link or simply clicking the New Tab tab, everything would go dead for a good 10-20 seconds until IE8would finally show a new tab and then begin trying to open something in it. (Yeah, it always feels like longer.) It finally began bothering me enough that I started searching for a fix.

The first suggestion I came upon had to do with the restricted sites list. Checked -- didn't have one.

The second suggestion was to run regsvr32 actxprxy.dll. Tried it -- no improvement.

(That doesn't mean that either of those fixes are wrong, it just means I have some other issue.)

I finally came across the fix that I needed in the comments to a post criticizing that second fix above. Add-ons! Clicked Tools -> Manage Add-Ons and there it was: ZuneIEPlugin.ZuneBHO, with a load time of 7.62 seconds. I disabled it and voilà! My tabs work nicely again.

If you too suffer from sluggish tabs, try those three suggestions and hopefully one of them will work for you as well!

Where did "Key Concepts" go?

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:23:00 GMT

Back when Operations Manager 2007 was released, the content team posted an online version of a Key Concepts Guide and a download version. When you look at our documentation download page for Ops Mgr 2007 R2, Key Concepts isn't listed. Where did it go?

When the product was new, we wanted to highlight Key Concepts to clarify the differences between MOM 2005 and Ops Mgr 2007. With R2, we're not really a "new" product anymore. The explanations of model-based design, service modeling, and health modeling are primarily of value to the authoring experience. So, when we reorganized the content library in the R2 release, the Key Concepts content was added to the Management Pack Authoring Guide.

P.S. The links to the original content (first paragraph) still pull up the original content, but notice that the left navigation pane fails to resolve to a table of contents. Whenever you hit TechNet content and the navigation pane goes generic, you know you've reached deprecated content.

Product knowledge in management packs

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:37:00 GMT

Some components of management packs include product knowledge, which is just information provided by the MP author (as compared to company knowledge which is information provided by the user in their own copy of the MP). We're working on internal guidelines to help MP authors provide effective knowledge, so I'd like to know what your thoughts are -- what would you expect (hope) to learn from the product knowledge for any or all of the following components?

Management pack (the properties of a management pack can include product knowledge)
Discoveries
Rules
Monitors
Reports

Please leave a comment here or send email to mpgfeed@microsoft.com!

ReadMe vs. Guide

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:38:00 GMT

You might notice in the management pack guide library that some guides are quite extensive (like Active Directory) and some are a single webpage with "ReadMe" in the name (like FRS). You might also notice in the installation folder for some management packs that there are two documents: a guide and another that has MPAdd or ReadMe in the name.

What's going on with those? Last year and early this year, a number of MOM 2005 management packs were converted for Operations Manager 2007. When we released the converted management packs, we included the original documentation for the MOM 2005 management pack and added a supplementary document to provide any information that was unique to the converted management pack. Not rewriting the guides was primarily a resource decision, so we could make more management packs available more quickly.

What that means is if the supplementary document (which is specific to the Ops Mgr 2007 MP) says one thing and the guide (which was written for the original MP) says another, the supplementary document is correct. We just didn't explain that clearly enough in the supplementary documents.

An operating system, a horse, and transparency

Jeanie Decker — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:43:00 GMT

Catching up on my Microsoft-related blog feeds this morning, I counted at least a dozen blogs announcing the new Windows 7 blog -- some rah-rah posts, some just passing it on, some speculating as to how much information the blog will actually provide, plus some conversations on the pros and cons of transparency.

Coincidentally, last night I came across an example that illustrates when transparency is the best solution for a situation.

You see, the town of Hickman, Nebraska has made national news because they want to evict an old horse from city limits. I'm guessing that they've been inundated with queries, complaints, and accusations as a result. So, they turned their city's homepage into a timeline of events to explain the situation to all of us who probably couldn't find Hickman on a map and have no intention of moving there but feel it's our business whether the horse stays or goes. (You can probably tell that my sympathy has shifted toward the town's side...)

In my aspect as a customer, I'd be fascinated by similar disclosure about a product in development. But I can also imagine reading "Discussed flippeting the gibbet. Decided it wasn't feasible in this timeline." and being disappointed, because although I'd never had cause to flippet a gibbet before, now that it had been suggested and taken away, I wanted that feature back!

Support for Windows Server 2008

Jeanie Decker — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 23:30:00 GMT

I know many of you have been waiting ~~anxiously~~ eagerly for management packs for Windows Server 2008. The support statement has been released and now we can start publishing them to the Catalog. Be sure to read Clive's post carefully, he calls out some important information that you'll want to be aware of.

Adding change logs to management pack guides

Jeanie Decker — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:16:00 GMT

If you've downloaded a recently updated management pack for Ops Mgr 2007, such as the SQL 2000/2005 MP, you might have noticed something new in the accompanying guide. We've begun adding lists of the specific changes made to the updated MP. And as a subsequent update is released, we're adding the new changes while still retaining the previous change log, so you get lists of all changes since the original release.

That's the idea, but of course it isn't feasible to accomplish it for updates that were released before we added changes to the guides. But look for it in management pack updates going forward!*

*Caveat: I can only commit to change logs in guides for MPs from our team, which is currently producing MPs for SQL, Exchange, and various server technologies such as DHCP, DNS, Terminal Services, and so on. That's the extent of my "authority". But another part of my job is to put together guidelines and standards for management pack guides and strongly encourage other teams across the company that produce management packs to incorporate them in their guides. So if you download an update to a management pack (from this point on) and its guide doesn't tell you what changed in the management pack, feel free to email mpgfeed expressing your disappointment. I'll forward it to the appropriate content team, so they'll be aware that customers want it.

Tuning tips

Jeanie Decker — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:44:00 GMT

I was looking for more specific guidance on tuning Ops Manager for a customer and found a great set of posts on this Operations Manager blog, so I thought I'd share:

System Center Content Search

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:35:00 GMT

I'm not a gadget-y sort of person. I mean, I like gadgets, but I've grown wary of them (both offline and on) because so often they're a disappointment -- either they don't deliver or I don't really have a use for them.

But recently I saw a presentation on a gadget that delivered the exact functionality that I've wished for numerous times: the ability to search just the System Center content on TechNet. So many times I need to look for technical content, and not just the information but the information as contained in our official documentation.

And now some folks have delivered with the System Center Content Search gadget for the Vista Sidebar. I installed it last week and have had to use it numerous times already, and :::drumroll::: it delivered exactly the results I needed every time (and usually as the first hit).

System Center Content Search was announced at MMS this week, so I waited till after the announcement to post about it (and to make sure it was worth recommending).

SP1 management packs: where are the guides?

Jeanie Decker — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:43:00 GMT

Most of our management packs are released to the download center (via the Ops Manager Catalog) with a guide included. When we released Ops Manager 2007 Service Pack 1, it included a number of management packs with it, but no guides, leading a number of you to ask us: "Where are the guides?" And the corresponding guides were available as separate downloads, but had not been updated to reflect the SP1 release, which led others to frustrated confusion -- were these the the right guides for the SP1 management packs?

So we removed the separate downloads (which, in turn, frustrated those looking for them). What we're doing to straighten this out, as quickly as possible:

Get the management pack guides available online in our TechCenter.
Identify the changes made to each management pack in the SP1 release and update the guides with that information.
Post each management pack from the SP1 release with its updated guide to the download center and the Catalog.

I'm hoping to have the SP1 management pack guides in the TechCenter within a week or so (with the SP1 change logs to be added as soon as they're complete), and will post as soon as it happens. In the meantime, if you need one of the existing (not updated for SP1) guides for any of the management packs included with SP1, email mpgfeed@microsoft.com and I'll send it to you.

Subtle improvement to management pack installation

Jeanie Decker — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:28:00 GMT

I'm thrilled with this change, even though it's just a few words. Previously, the .msi files for management packs used just the product/technology name, which resulted in a nice default folder organization like this:

System Center Management Packs

Exchange Server 2003

SQL Server 2005

But the name string also resulted in a dialog box that would say "Installing Windows Server Operating System".

We've added "Management Pack" to the name, so now you'll see "Installing Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack" instead of "Installing Exchange Server 2003". I don't think our old method caused any real problems for anyone, but it's a bit disconcerting to glance at your monitor and see things like "Installing Active Directory". And it isn't much fun to be proposed as "the most frightening dialogue box ever".

The folder structure picks up the new words as well:

System Center Management Packs

Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack

SQL Server 2005 Management Pack

Come to think of it, that might also be helpful for anyone who prefers to install management packs to a structure other than within a parent folder named "Management Packs".