Microsoft News Tracker

The traditional weakness of Microsoft’s system management software has been that no matter how good it was for managing Microsoft systems, it didn’t play in the heterogeneous environments that predominate in large enterprises. Yesterday, Microsoft stepped up to that challenge with public betas of new heterogeneous environment enhancements for their flagship data center management products, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager:

Microsoft today announced the availability of a public beta for System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions, which build on the existing Operations Manager 2007 technology and capabilities and are designed to help customers extend the value of their Microsoft System Center investments. Providing customers with a comprehensive management solution, this new end-to-end IT systems monitoring capability incorporates industry standards and proven open source technologies, including Web Services for Management (WS-Management) and OpenPegasus, extending the capabilities across both physical and virtualized Windows and non-Windows operating systems and applications. Microsoft delivers the core foundational cross-platform support out of the box for HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Sun Solaris and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems so that partners can focus on adding their deep domain expertise in the form of management packs. Companies such as Novell Inc., Quest Software Inc. and Xandros Inc. have demonstrated their support by working to deliver monitoring abilities for applications made by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, MySQL AB and Oracle.

Further demonstrating support for its commitment to OpenPegasus, Microsoft also announced today that it will be joining the OpenPegasus Steering Committee and contribute code back to the open source community under the Microsoft Public License, an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license.
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Microsoft also delivered a beta of the updated System Center Operations Manager 2007 Connectors, based on many of the same extensible open source technology and industry standards as the Cross Platform Extensions, which provide an integrated administrative experience and the ability to interoperate and exchange System Center monitoring data with third-party management offerings such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console.

Also delivered today was the public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (formerly code-named “Virtual Machine Manager vNext”), which enables customers to configure and deploy new virtual machines and to centrally manage their virtualized infrastructure, whether running on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMware ESX Server.

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, of course, but Microsoft clearly is making a serious run at the traditional enterprise system management vendors like HP and IBM. If you want to try the free samples, all three betas are downloadable at Microsoft Connect.

This week Microsoft is holding its TechEd 2007 conference and there’s a variety of news:

Bob Muglia, SVP of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business kicked off TechED 2007 by detailing the company’s strategy for Dynamic IT for the People-Ready Business (Dynamic IT). Apparently it was as bad as it sounds although there were some redeeming features.

More substantially, Muglia also announced assorted product news including the official names for Katmai and Orcas as well as revealing two acquisitions:

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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.

Maarten Goet at Techlog say his “sources within Microsoft” tell him that Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 was released to manufacturing last night and should be available in the various channels shortly. Also expect a big launch party next week at the Microsoft Management Summit 2007. Operations Manager had been promised in 1Q07 so they are coming in just under the wire. If you’d like to really see what is new, see the Operations Manager videos that Microsoft has posted.

Microsoft today staged a rolling launch of Windows Vista, Office 2007, Exchange 2007 , and associated products starting in Sydney, Australia and wrapping around the world through Asia and Europe to Steve Ballmer in New York who is still speaking as I write. The launch event so far has been as devoid of excitement as expected, but the important thing is that Microsoft at long last got Vista out the door.

Update: For the sake of completeness, according to the press release linked above, the full set of products launched today was:

Products Released

An * below indicates the product is available now.

Client upgrades
• Windows Vista Business *
• Office Professional 2007 *
• Office Project Professional 2007 *
• Office Visio Professional 2007 *
• Office InfoPath 2007 *
• Office OneNote 2007 *
• Office Communicator 2007

Client enterprise editions
• Windows Vista Enterprise *
• Office Enterprise 2007 *

Server upgrades
• Exchange Server 2007 *
• Office SharePoint Server 2007*
• Office Project Server 2007 *
• Forefront Security for Exchange Server *
• Forefront Security for SharePoint *
• System Center Configuration Manager 2007

Server Enterprise editions
• Windows Rights Management Services *
• System Center Operations Manager Enterprise 2007
• Unified Messaging Services for Exchange *
• Excel and Forms Services for SharePoint *

New products
• Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance
• Office Project Portfolio Server 2007 *
• Office Forms Server 2007 *
• Office SharePoint Designer 2007*
• Office Communications Server 2007
• “Voice Call Management” for Office Communication Server 2007
• Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
• Forefront Client Security
• Office Sharepoint Server for Search 2007 *
• SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007
• System Center “Desktop”
• Office Groove Server 2007*
• Office Groove 2007 *
• Exchange Hosted Services*