Part II of the MMS 2006 Keynote

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Like I already mentioned in my previous post about MMS 2006, Bob Muglia announcend a few other things.
The first one is the rebranding of some of our products to the System Center Brand name.

This means that the products like SMS and MOM will be changed into:

With that branding Bob also announced a new product called System Center, codename "Service Desk"

  • This product will be focused on automating IT across people and processes including solutions for Incident, Problem, Asset, and Change Management with many new scenarios enabled via a powerful self-service portal.
  • Critical to the Asset and Change Management functionality will be a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) built leveraging the System Definition Model
  • A core set of automated IT processes that map to our ITIL based Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) will be included as part of this solution
  • This product will provide deep integration with existing Microsoft technologies including SMS, MOM, Office System and Windows.
  • We are delivering not only a product, but also a platform that will be easily extensible by customers and partners with solution packs, just like management packs and MOM.
  • This initial offering will be targeted at new and existing MOM and SMS customers who are requesting this kind of functionality.
  • I just saw a demo on this product where the IT team had found a resolution for a reported problem, the next step they did was creating a change request on the Service desk console.
    Using the workflow within this product (based on Workflow foundation), the system sended a request to the Change request manager with a link to the change request ticket. After approval the engineer can directly shedule the patch update onto the SMS system, when this is done the patch gets advertised through the SMS server.

What is really great about this product is the tight integration with our products like MOM and SMS, in the console the Support Engineers can see where a call or incident has been reported from, this can be from MOM which founds for instance an issue onto the Exchange environment or can be a support call.

We plan to release a public beta of System Center, codename "Service Desk" in H1 of 2007.

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See live pictures and post on the Service Desk blog

Read the press release here.

The last two announcements during the keynote where that we are working on a management software for managing Virtual Server environment called codename "Carmine", he did not disclosed any information about that product, more information will follow in the coming months.

The second announcement was that the "WS-Management" has been accepted as a standard by DTMF. WS-Management is a new web-services specification that provides a common way for systems to remotely access and exchange management information.

More info about MMS 2006 in the upcoming posts.