SMS & MOM news from IT Forum 2004
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any SMS & MOM news, so it’s time to catch up on all of our announcements from IT Forum 2004 in Copenhagen last week. All of these downloads are free!
- The SMS 2003 OS Deployment Feature Pack is out of beta at last. If the phrases “in-place ugprade”, “bare-metal provisioning”, “user state migration”, “image deployment”, or “wipe and load” haunt your dreams, you need this.
- Also out of beta is the SMS 2003 Device Management Feature Pack. They really should have specified “Mobile Device” in that name, since it’s all about extending the reach of SMS to manage mobile devices running WinCE or Windows Mobile for Pocket PCs.
- If deploying desktop applications is more your style, there’s a new whitepaper on Using Microsoft SMS 2003 to Distribute Microsoft Office 2003, and there are two solution accelerators for Business Desktop Deployment, outlining best practices for standard and enterprise customers.
- The second release of the SMS 2003 Toolkit contains 22 tools to help deploy and troubleshoot SMS 2003. A must-have for SMS administrators.
- Point the Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit at your legacy NT4 servers and it’ll create a virtual server image, ready to be run on a shiny new Windows Server 2003 machine. And check out the Mixed Workload Consolidation Guide for more server consolidation advice.
- If you want to use MOM to monitor your RAS, VPN, or routing infrastructure, there’s a new Management Pack for Routing and Remote Access just for you.
- The MOM team also released a development guide for customers who want to create their own custom MOM 2005 management packs.
- And last but definitely not least, you’ve probably heard about the collaboration between Dell and Microsoft on computer management. The first two deliverables from this are the Dell Management Pack for MOM, and the SMS 2003 Inventory Tool for Dell Updates (RC1).
Phew…