System Center Essentials 2007 RC1 released

For those of you who are involved in the management and monitoring of small to mid-size Microsoft infrastructures, I would thoroughly reccomend that you have a look at System Center Essentials (SCE) 2007. RC1 for this product has been released.

In a nutshell, SCE 2007 provides a unified management solution that enables IT professionals in midsize organizations to proactively manage their IT environment with increased efficiency. It's designed for organisations with up to 30 Windows servers and 500 Windows clients and will allow you to perform the following tasks:

  • Proactive monitoring and troubleshooting diagnostics for your Windows-based servers, Windows-based clients, applications and network devices
  • Update management for Microsoft and third-party applications and devices

 

  • Software deployment of MSI and EXE installed software packages, including third-party applications

 

  • Hardware and software inventory with 30+ attributes collected for things like available disk space, RAM and installed applications with version number

 

  • Integrated reporting including 50+ reports for things like inventory, update deployment status and automated daily health status reports for your IT environment

The great thing about SCE 2007 is that it's a single server solution, and all of the available functionality can be managed from a single console. It really has been developed with the small to midsize enterprise in mind.

You can get further information, including a demo of the product at https://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sce/default.mspx