After MMS 2006
So after a week in US @ MMS I am back in Poland. Here’s a couple of impressions from the Microsoft Management Summit 2006 in San Diego.
Technical Side
There were some exciting new things announced and presented at the summit. For me the most interesting technologies are:
PowerShell (previously Monad)
Finally the new products (starting with Operations Manager and Exchange) will have the ability to be administered both from GUI and commandline via Powershell. This is a .NET object-oriented commandline, which makes it even more compelling to use (e.g. it takes one line of code to show a sorted chart with mailbox sizes for Exchange).
Useful resources for PowerShell:
https://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
https://computerperformance.co.uk/powershell/index.htm
Operations Manager 2007 (previously MOMv3)
Totally redesigned. The concept of monitoring is now based on monitoring services not computers. This gives better business perspective. It is clear that most of the code base must have been completely rewritten.
Beta 2 will release in May/June and will RTM in November/December.
To register for Beta: https://www.microsoft.com/mom/evaluation/beta/opsmgroverview.mspx
WS-management
Web Service Management is part of Windows Server R2 and will be embedded in next release Windows Vista – this is a new to Windows, exciting management technology based on SOAP. It is approved by DMTF as a standard, which hopefully will mean better interaction in heterogeneous IT environments. Microsoft’s implementation of WS-management is called Windows Remote Management (WinRM) It will also be one of the built-in event sources for Operations Manager 2007 – we will soon see in practice how it works. I really believe that utilizing Web services is currently the best way to go with distributed management, especially if we go out to WAN or event internet management and not only WAN.
Read more:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/winrm/winrm/portal.asp
Service Desk
This product might finally be the answer to many questions I received: do we have a product that centralizes the whole System Center family? Do we have a product that is an implementation of ITIL/MOF? Do we have a CMDB product? Well, with Service Desk we might finally be able to implement these features and join all the products together with Knowledge Base, CMDB, ITPortal functionalities. The product will ship at the end of 2007.
Presentations:
Brian had a very interesting presentation of his scripting solutions for MOM. It’s really great of him to publish the solutions: https://brianwren.members.winisp.net. Thanks, Brian!
Generally it was great to meet many people both from inside the company (finally I got to match faces with aliases from DLs) and other companies. I got to meet Rory and John. Rory is conducting MOM bootcamps, and John just published a book on MOM. While being at the GP booth at Expo and wandering around to other areas I received some important feedback for our products, which I forwarded to our product groups. I also took notes of existing problems and researched/discussed those with other folks. Send me an email in case I did not get back to you, so I can let you know what my findings were.
Freetime
I spent 5 days in San Diego, I enjoyed my stay quite a lot. And on the last day I went with my friend Tomek to LA. He convinced me to see Sri Sri Ravi Shankar – the founder of “Art of Living”. It was really inspiring and I am now looking forward to going on this course.
I posted some pictures from the trip and I will add more shortly: https://blogs.technet.com/photos/alipka/11145/slideshowpro.aspx