The Service Desk function is the primary point of contact between end users and the IT organization or service provider. Its primary goal is often described as to restore service to and to fulfill requests from users as quickly as possible. However, best practice suggests that the Service Desk be given a broader role beyond that of a traditional Help Desk, a role that spans the processes of incident, problem, change, and asset and configuration management. Organizations face three key challenges as they adopt this broader approach:
1) Traditional Service or Help Desk products and technologies are inflexible, requiring expensive and time consuming customizations that slow down the adoption of newer capabilities
2) Some products lack integration of Service Desk functionality into a broader set of IT management products and capabilities such as operational monitoring and automated configuration management
3) Still other products lack direct support for the adoption, integration and optimization of processes that are primarily driven by best practice frameworks such as Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) and ITIL®.
System Center Service Manager, scheduled for release in early 2010, is being designed to help organizations deal effectively with each of these three challenges. This whitepaper outlines the vision for Service Manager and its planned capabilities.
Download the System Center Service Manager Vision and Planned Capabilities Whitepaper
System Center Service Manager Beta 1 has shipped!
You can download the Beta from Connect:
https://connect.microsoft.com/SelfNomination.aspx?ProgramID=2733&pageType=1&SiteID=446
The System Center Operations Manager team is excited to announce the availability of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta, which is ready for you to download through Microsoft Connect today!
As announced and demonstrated by Brad Anderson at TechEd EMEA 2008 earlier this month, Operations Manager 2007 R2 will deliver key new capabilities including cross-platform monitoring, service-level tracking, new and updated monitor templates (including process, OLE DB, NT Service, and Unix/Linux log file), and much more! (
continue at source)
Rod Trent: Use this registry tweak to enable verbose logging for ConfigMgr 2007.
Setting this flag automatically triggers more information in the logs and does not require a reboot or restart of the system.
To enable verbose logging after installation, change the following value to 0. You will need to right click on the @Global key and change permissions to allow the current user to change the data in the key.
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\CCM\Logging\@Global\Loglevel
The Security Compliance Management toolkit provides customers with best practices from Microsoft about how to plan, set, get and remediate a security baseline, along with tools that you can use to verify the implementation of recommended security baselines from Microsoft for Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.
The toolkit helps customers quickly and easily provide this compliance information to auditors to demonstrate how their organization is meeting important compliance regulations.
The toolkit helps customers manage the compliance process by enabling:
* Automated security checks in their environment.
* Verification of security baseline in their environment, and identification of baseline settings changes or “drift” from prescribed values.
* Implement regulatory compliance through security checks.
The verification process is performed by Configuration Packs that can be applied using the desired configuration management (DCM) feature of Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007.
Download:
Security Compliance Management for SCCM/DCM Beta
The Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) is the premier event of the year for IT Professionals, offering deep technical information and training on the latest IT management solutions from Microsoft. The event will be from April 27 till May 1 2009.
In this tenth-anniversary year, MMS 2009 will be bigger and better than ever. In addition to executive keynotes, Microsoft experts and industry leaders will present more than 100 technical sessions, all packed with demos. MMS 2009 will feature more than 9,000 Hands-on Lab places during the week, most led by experts providing a guided tour of the latest technologies.
Visit the MMS 2009 website for more information, and to register
Anders Bengtsson: Yesterday I attend at Michael Nappi session “System Center Service Manager Product Overview”. During this the roadmap of Service Manager was shown.
* 2008 H2, Beta 1 (early December or end of November, will not include the self-service IT portal)
* 2009 H1, Beta 2 (summer 2009, will include the self-service IT portal and will also be feature complete)
* 2009 H2, RC
* 2010 H1, RTM
We at Techlog reported earlier on the
roadmap of Service Manager :
* Beta 1 Refresh at the end of 2008 calender year;
* Beta 2 Milestone -- which will be feature complete -- at the end of second quarter of 2009;
* RC Milestone end third or beginning fourth quarter of 2009;
* RTM at the first half of 2010 or sooner.
Seems like MS is still on schedule with System Center Service Manager.
Windows Embedded Standard 2009 includes a Prerequisite Component that includes all the components required to install the System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 Client onto your Standard Device.
OpsMgr 2007 is not supported by XPe SP2, FP2007 or Update Rollup 1.0. This is due to the fact that OpsMgr 2007 SP1 requires MSXML6 which was not included in XPe Sp2, Feature Pack 2007 or Update Rollup 1.0. So we are not able to create a Prerequisite Macro, nor has the OpsMgr Team done any testing to ensure their client installs properly on these platforms.
XPe FP2007 and Update Rollup 1.0 still support Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 SP1.This was the previous version of OpsMgr. You must add the MOM 2005 SP1 prerequisite component to your component database, and then you can add it to your image. Check out Lynda’s previous blog post for
more details here.Or you can download the
component here.
Microsoft has published a System Center Operations Manager 2007 technical walkthrough. During this walktrough the following topics will be discussed:
- Topology and Migration
- Deploying Operations Manager 2007
- Using Operations Manager 2007
- Operations Manager 2007 Solutions
- Resources
- IT Map
Personal note: The only thing i don't understand is that it's made in flash? I would have expected a Silverlight version..
Visit the System Center Operations Manager 2007 technical walkthrough
Barry Shilmover announces the beta of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 at TechEd EMEA and tells us about some of the cool features coming out. The cross platform extensions component will be open source for the 1st time and will be automatically included in R2. Here’s a list of topics Barry talks about:
* What new things you can do in R2
* Management of Linux / Unix operating systems and applications
* Service Level Monitoring capabilities
* Explanation of why people should be confident Microsoft can do cross-platform management
The beta will be available end of November 2008, RTM is scheduled for the 1st half of calendar year 2009
Checkout
Barry’s cross platform demo on Edge
Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management and Services division at Microsoft, talked about Microsoft's online proposition; ranging from customer hosted, partner hosted to Microsoft hosted called "MS online services": Windows Live and Live Mesh, today at the
Teched EMEA 2008 IT Pro keynote.
Microsoft would like to enable the customers a choice where to host their applications, built by tools like .NET and Visual Studio. Kayvaan Ghassemieh, senior PM for Exchange Online, was invited to stage to demo Exchange Online. A service provided by Microsoft in the cloud. The scenario he showed was moving mailbox and mailbox data to the cloud. Kayvaan took steps to sync the local Active Directory to the cloud, then starting a local Migration Tool on the customer premise, and moving the mailbox out.
Microsoft Online Services will be available in Spring 2009
Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management and Services division at Microsoft, announced the
successor to SQL 2008; codenamed SQL Server "Kilimanjaro" and SQL Self Service Analysis codenamed "Gemini" today at the
Teched EMEA 2008 IT Pro keynote.
Christian Petculescu, principal architect for the SQL team, was invited to stage. He demo'd SQL "gemini", loading million of rows into the "Gemini" GUI (looking like an Excel variant). It was lightning fast, on a regular PC. It seems to be something similar to using SQL analysis in Excel currently, but with a more intuitive and faster experience for the business user. The "gemini" engine handles the data, models and relationships, without the user to worry about it. Christian also demo'd using SQL analysis services and the Solution Accelerator for System Center Operations Manager -- utilizing PerformancePoint -- to drill down on operational data, and conclude where the root problem lies.
Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management and Services division at Microsoft, talked about the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 platform release today at the
Teched EMEA 2008 IT Pro keynote. Justin Graham, senior PM for Windows Server/Windows 7 team, was invited to stage. He demo'd the new R2 Branch Cache solution, to reduce bandwith between branch offices.
However, we spotted that Justin was running Windows 7, build 6801 (the PDC version) conjunction with
build 6801 of Windows Server 7 Enterprise to show the caching principles. At this time we are unsure if Windows Server 7 will be the successor to Windows Server 2008 R2, or the definitive name for WS2008 R2, to be on par with the client naming/numbering.
Windows Server 7 Enterprise: Build 6801
Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management and Services division at Microsoft, talked about the upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2 platform release today at the
Teched EMEA 2008 IT Pro keynote.
The M3 beta build will be available shortly. It has the following new features: Hyper-V R2, Live Migration and new RDP servcices. It will support ASP.NET on IIS on Server Core. Powershell 2.0 will be included and a Best Practices Analyzer will be integrated. Three other features: DirectAccess, BranchCache and Bitlocker to Go (for removable drives)
Exclusive: Windows Server 2008 R2 will also deliver an integrated solution for VDI, Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure, Brad said.
Brad Anderson, general manager of the Management and Services division at Microsoft, talked about Microsoft's broad virtualization offerings today at the
Teched EMEA 2008 IT Pro keynote. Server virtualization provided by Hyper-V, Desktop virtualization provided by Vista Centralized Desktop (formerly Kidaro -- now part of the MDOP offering), Application virtualization provided by App-V (formerly Softgrid) and Presentation virtualization provided by WS2008 terminal services.
Exclusive: Brad Anderson announced during his talk that Vista Centralized Desktop (formerly Kidaro) will be integrated into System Center Configuration Manager in the (near) future!
Teched EMEA IT Pro, the new name for EMEA's flagship event, previously called IT Forum, officially kicked off on Monday with a Keynote by Brad Anderson. A nice touch to the waiting time before the Keynote started, was that they had a DJ on stage mixing dance and hip hop music live, while a video stream was played on the big screen.
Brad Anderson, general manager for the Management and Services division, started the Keynote called "Dynamic IT, Key to IT Efficiencies & Innovation". He emphasized that 2007 was a big year for Microsoft, releasing a lot of new significant products like System Center and the WS2008 platform.
In current IT practices, Microsoft recognizes these key priorities; Virtualization, Green IT, Cloud Services, Anywhere Access, Compliance and Business Intelligence. IT has to balance between driving down costs and delivering new business capabilities. Microsoft tries to deliver this both, under the "Do more with less" initiative.
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