Microsoft News Tracker

Last week, Microsoft held its Microsoft Management Summit 2007 in San Diego and Mary Jo Foley, Omar van der Hoeven, and Maarten Goet have details and summaries of the high points. Key items related to Microsoft product plans:

• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007: As rumored, general availability was announced for April 1. Microsoft also announced the licensing of EMC’s Smarts network discovery and health monitoring technology to be included in a future version of SCOM (presumably the 2008 version) and an EMC Smarts Connector with some of the eventual functionality to be available in May for SCOM 2007.
• Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003: Service Pack 3 is due in three to four weeks.
• System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007: SCCM is the successor to SMS and is due to ship this summer. The features for SCCM 2007 SP1 and a R2 version are already being planned.
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Beta 2 due in April with GA this summer.
• System Center Service Manager 2007: Beta 1 due in April with no public estimate for ship.
• System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2007: (via Bink.nu) Beta 2 in April and GA in the fall.

Also related, Microsoft with a group of other tech companies have submitted their Service Modeling Language specification to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for review as an industrywide standard.