News

Microsoft Updates Roadmap at MMS

• By Stuart J. Johnston
• April 26, 2006

Microsoft Tuesday unveiled a new service desk product in its growing System Center line of management tools, and updated the roadmap for its Dynamic Systems Initiative. The announcements came at the company’s Microsoft Management Summit 2006 in San Diego.

Officials said they are working on Systems Center Service Desk, a solution that will provide two key components for System Center: a workflow engine and a configuration management database, which will be the foundation of System Center’s asset and change management capabilities. It is due in the latter part of 2007.

To show the growing integration among its management products, the company also renamed two key products to reflect the System Center branding as well as the increased integration between them being added in their next versions. “Microsoft Operations Manager “V3” will be named System Center Operations Manager 2007, while Systems Management Server “V4” will become System Center Configuration Manager 2007,” Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business, told attendees during his opening keynote.

The company also officially named the next version of its e-mail engine Exchange Server 2007. It had previously been code-named “Exchange 12.” Muglia also demonstrated the Exchange Management Shell, a scriptable command line shell based on what Microsoft now calls Windows PowerShell -- previously codenamed “Monad.” Windows PowerShell will be available as a no-charge Web download in the second half of this year, the company said.

All the moves are part of the company’s so-called Dynamic Systems Initiative or DSI. The term refers to Microsoft’s “vision of delivering self-managing dynamic systems that will help enable customers to achieve higher business value through automation, flexible resource utilization and knowledge-based processes,” according to a company statement.

DSI was introduced three years ago. The overall concept also heavily involves Microsoft’s plays in the server and PC virtualization arenas. Muglia has described part of the DSI vision as one in which virtual machines span multiple servers and workloads are automatically shifted among them as needed – thus combining virtualization with dynamic systems management.

Officials also highlighted how far the Systems Center product line and DSI have come in the past year. In that time, Microsoft shipped System Center Data Protection Manager, System Center Capacity Planner and Systems Management Server 2003 Release 2. The company also released 30 management packs for Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) while third parties provided another 28, according to company statements.

Additionally, Microsoft recently released System Center Reporting Manager, a tool aimed at providing integrated reporting capabilities across MOM and Microsoft System Management Server.