Innovative Technology Weblog

Today I attended another “Service Desk� session, this time with plenty of XML and InfoPath. The purpose of the sessions was to show how to extend Service Manager. Maybe because of pre beta 1 code, or because it just didn’t work as expected, some of the demos failed but it did not kill my enthusiasm.

Probably the highlight of today’s session was when Marielle, a colleague, asked a quite interesting question. She is rather small so could not reach the phone and behaved as one of those rock stars from the eighties. Her question, “What is your definition from a CMDB?�

The question was related to what content is stored in the Service manager CMDB. The presenters were talking about storing incident and change management data in the CMDB. After some confusion we managed to have a one on one with the CMDB program manager which actually brought the session to a much higher level. Anyway the CMDB stores CI information but Service manager can query more, it could even do SQL joins…

I think we talked about 15 minutes about the Service manager “Federated CMDB� and this talk gave some inside in what Service Manager is doing at the moment, pull down information from different resources into the CMDB and future plans to leave the information where it is and look at the CMDB as a distributed database and use information from other databases in Service manager or somewhere else based on connectors.

I tried to get some information about future plans regarding a connector to Carmine, Virtual Machine Manager because I really think that Virtualization on demand can help the Microsoft Dynamic System Initiative. Sadly enough not a clear answer on that one.

What became clear is that there are plans to really dig into deployment based on DCM information. For example if an application has a DCM policy that defines that the application can only be installed on a clustered server, Service Manager could use this information to find a clustered server and install the application if it find a suitable candidate.

One other nice example mentioned in the talk regarding the possibilities in  Service Manager; suppose you want to order a laptop with specifics specs, you could ask Service Manager “Which laptop has these hardware specs and has the least amount of hardware calls and no battery replacements?�

I am even more excited but have to go to the party, it looks like MS bought part of the town for a partyJ

Today I had a lunch with some great guys, some i know and a few new guys.

Stefan Stranger
Maarten Goet
Steven Bink
Roeland Kuipers
Robert Bakker
Daniel van Soest

Under the warm sun we enjoyed some beers, soda’s, fries, Burgers and other food. Also we had a nice conversation about blogging and MMS in general. Daniel told us that the upcomming event on june 18th in the RAI in The Netherland is gonna be an event that you dont wanna miss. If you want to get updated on this upcomming event please bookmark the Dutch events site : http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/evenementen/default.aspx

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?

Today the midweek keynote, Manage Complexity and Achieve Agility with System Center, was presented by Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Windows Enterprise Management Division at Microsoft.

For your convenience I’ve uploaded the complete presentation as a Dia Slideshow.

Click here for the slideshow.

Some interesting announcements were made today by Kirill;

• SMS 2003 SP3 will be available in April and contains the AssetMetrix’ Asset management that was acquired last year.
• In a month from now System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 beta2 will be available.
• Also System Center Virtual Machine Manager beta 2 will become available within the next month.
• System Center codename ‘ServiceDesk’ will be renamed to System Center Service Manager, for this product a public beta will come available within 45 days.

Also a small roadmap of what to come in the System Center productline is shown;

Some cool demo’s were given of SCCM with desired configuration management and a real cool demo of System Center Service Manager showing the provisioning interface build in sharepoint in combination with a cool Vista Sidebar gadget that lets the user track his changes or incidents.

For more information on MMS please visit these blogs also :

Stefan Stranger
Maarten Goet

Live from MMS San Diego I present you the slidedeck of the keynote presentation that was presented by Bob Muglia.

Diashow of the Slidedeck

Some Interesting announcements were done by Bob:

* SCOM 2007 is released last week and will be available to the bigger public starting the first week of April.
* Microsoft is partnering up with Cisco and EMC to work on the Systems Modeling Language (SML)
* Microsoft & EMC will delivering EMC’s SMART into the next version of SCOM2007 to deliver a out-of-the-box hardware monitor experience.
* 6 months after the release of Longhorn Microsoft will release the next version of Virtual Server

Also at the keynote a demo of Longhorn as a virtual platform was giving and Microsoft demonstrated an impressive 8 core 64 bit virtual machine (as a guest machine)

Realy like it for so far.

Also check out these Logs:

Stefan Stranger
Maarten Goet