Service Manager Test Drive Available Now

mumeno — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:06:08 GMT

I have exciting news to share!

We have a Service Manager Test Drive preview of Beta 2 available to try out now. It’s on hosted VMs, so all you need to do is log in with your Windows Live ID and start playing with it.

The VMs have all of the same sample data we used in our demonstrations at the Microsoft Management Summit. You will be able to evaluate the core Incident, Change, and Configuration Management features, as well as integration with Active Directory, System Center Configuration Manager and System Center Operations Manager. There is also some sample data for a few reports available in the Test Drive.

Please check it out and let us know what you think – you can post feedback and questions in the Service Manager TechNet forum.

What are the Top Reasons for Non-compliance?

mumeno — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 05:40:48 GMT

This is a very fundamental question for Admins trying to raise the level of software update compliance at their company.

Traditionally using SMS 2003, the normal practice was to look at a sample of client logs and use that as a basis for guessing what the top problems were for non-compliance.

In SCCM 2007, we have added a couple of new reports that can help solve this problem for Scan and Deployment, "Troubleshooting 1 - Scan Errors" & "Troubleshooting 2 - Deployment Errors" which displays groupings of the last error received from clients. You can sort by the "count" column to get a stack-ranked list of these errors, which can greatly increase the accuracy in determining the exact top non-compliance issues and dramatically reduce the time & effort required to make the assessment.

No more scrubbing through client logs!

In real-life deployments within MSIT and TAP customers, we used these reports constantly to quickly identify problem areas such as Group Policy conflicts, low WUA version, networking issues, and SUP configuration issues. By addressing the top problems, customers were able to eliminate major sources of failures and achieve much greater compliance numbers.

Marc Umeno's Blog : Reports

Service Manager Test Drive Available Now

What are the Top Reasons for Non-compliance?