Innovative Technology Weblog

For some reason I get excited when I see a solution or framework that consist of multiple products and technologies. The last two years I spend a lot of time on Business Desktop Deployment which is a solution build around a huge list of products.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the revitalization of the CMDB and I got some comments back that were really interesting, MS is trying to patent CMDB. Today I attended a great overview sessions about Microsoft System Center Service Manager, previous coded as Service Desk at MMS 2007 in San Diego (CA).

Service Manager can be seen as the delivery system of the Microsoft‘s Dynamic System Initiative and false in the last phase of Infrastructure Optimization, the dynamic phase.

So why so exited? Let us look at an example scenario and demo from today:

A user goes to a SharePoint portal and requests an application. The application list is not a static database table but is actually provided by a SCCM 2007(SMS v4) connector which will be shipped as part of Service manager. Besides the list of applications there could be also some logic to find the user’s desktop name by querying SCCM 2007 and the primary user for the machine. The user submits the request and Service manager will initiate a Change Request and queries the Active Directory (Service Manager will ship with a Active Directory connector) for the users manager. Active Directory is queried for the users manager email address and an email with the request is send to the user’s manager. The user’s manager receives the email and approves the request. Service manager receives the approval and send a software distribution task to SCCM 2007 over the SCCM 2007 connector. In  the mean time the user requesting the software can see the approval in his Service Manager gadget on his / her desktop (see the previous blog from Stephan). After a while the software gets installed. This is not the end of the story because there is no one to close the call, or is there? Service After a while SCCM 2007 hard and software inventory runs on the machine and finds the installed software and reports this to Service manager. Service Manager get informed and closes the call.

Some similar automated scenarios are possible by defining DCM (Desired Configuration Management) policies, like checking for Antivirus Software. If DCM does not find a correct installation it fires a configuration mismatch, Service Manager logs an incident and send a repair job to SCCM 2007. The next DCM cycle the installation is checked and the incident is closed. Or using the CMDB as a deployment database, add assets to the CMDB, send them to SCCM 2007 and deploy with a baremetal scenario and check with hard and software inventory and DCM if they  really are deployed and check with DCM if they are deployed wsith the correct configuration.

When Service Manager ships, it will also have a SCOM 2007 (MOM v3) connector. And hopefully after a while also a Virtual Machine Manager connector servers can bee added when needed.

Am I too excited?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 3:08 am and is filed under MMS 2007, System Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.