Innovative Technology Weblog

Source: textBox1

In my search for monitoring my XBOX 360 I stumbled on the blogsite of Lance Robinson and he had an article about “Output any newsgroup as an RSS feed in a half dozen lines of codes”. To get this running you need RSSbus and of course the code from Lance Robinson. RSSBus can turn Anything Into a Feed. Easily create RSS feeds from Databases, Spreadsheets, Emails, Directories, etc.  Use RSS feeds as Simple Web Services to communicate with your partners, vendors, and customers - not just text, but data and services. That sounded cool but RSSBus runs on Windows platforms and requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework, so that would be a problem for my website running on Linux.

But then I tried if I could use the website of textBox1 for getting other newsgroups than the one given by Lance. And yes it also works for other newsgroups like the Microsoft.public.mom newsgroup. I don’t know if this is a service Lance wants to offer but it works great!

Regards,
Stefan Stranger
http://weblog.stranger.nl

SCOM 2007 Beta 2 System Center Operations Manager 2007 Beta 2 is a big step forward for Microsoft’s management platform, although there is no way to upgrade current MOM installations. New user roles, design templates and discovery methods will ease installation and make the product easier to use in audit-conscious organizations. For more information, go to www.microsoft.com.

Go to eWeek.com for the  whole review.

Regards,
Stefan Stranger
http://weblog.stranger.nl

For those who haven’t seen this blog on my personal weblog here info about Ops Mgr 2007 as heard and seen at MMS 2006.

If you were not that lucky to go at MMS 2006 in San Diego as me, this is what you should know about System Center Operations Manager 2007. Or maybe better this what I was able to remember and was able to see

MOMv3 is renamed to System Center Operations Manager 2007 (Ops Mgr 2007). All the products in the management suite are renamed to System Center. SMSv4 is renamed to System Center Configuration Manager 2007.

MOM Workgroup Edition is going to be replaced by System Center Essentials. This will provide Management for the mid market and service providers. (~50 - 500 pc’s). Single console designed with simplicity. Easily secure, update, monitor and track your entire IT environment. More effectively service and support users Support for management services. Customers can easily upgrade to System Center Essentials from existing versions of Operations Manager and Windows Server Update Services. Sign up for the beta here.

The pillars for the design of Ops Mgr 2007 were/are:

• Easy to use
• Knowledge driven
• Service Oriented
• Enterprise Class

I’ll use the pillars for all the new things of Ops Mgr 2007.

Easy to Use. What is Easy to Use in Ops Mgr 2007?

Ops Mgr 2007 leverages Active Directory for discovery, user accounts, groups & agent configuration. It now uses Service Points/Records that can be used by Agents for finding the right Management Server to report to when deployed for instance with an image of by System Center Configurations Manager (SMS). You should create an OU and create the necessary Service Points for your environment and are ready to go. You can discovery network devices with the new discovery process.
New self tuning thresholds adjust alerting to business usage patterns. Instead of looking at the performance data and re-configuring the thresholds this is automated in Ops Mgr 2007.
It’s easier to use, customize, and author reports. There is no need anymore to go the SQL Reporting Services website to author reports. This all can be done from the Ops Console in the Authoring Workspace.
The MP’s are not in binary format anymore (*.akm files) but are now XML based with versioning. The reports are included in the XML file. There is also an option to seal a MP so it’s read-only.
Now there is a single Operations Console with role based security. There are four Workspaces in the Ops Console, Monitoring, Authoring, Administration, My Workspace.
And finally it’s much easier to locate information with overview pages and integrated search and find.

Knowledge driven. What does Microsoft mean with Knowledge driven? It must be easy to resolve problems. This is done by providing knowledge (in the MP’s) , views, dashboards and inline tasks. Personalizing monitoring via My? Workspace. Proactive problem management of crash and hang data via Agentless Exception Monitoring Windows Client utilization, reliability, and error monitoring of Vista, XP, and the Office suite Audit collection service efficiently archives security event logs.

The knowledge is captured in Models and are based on the Systems Definition Model (SDM) schema and presented in XML.

Service Oriented. The core of Ops Mgr 2007 is Service Oriented Monitoring. You are no longer monitoring computers or apps but Services like mail, Internet access, LOB applications. Now you can monitor the health of distributed applications all the way down to hardware level. It’s possible the look at an application through the eyes of an end user with the use of synthetic transactions. You can create your own LOB MP’s for your distributed apps with the distributed application templates and Designer.

Enterprise Class. With next version of MOM it will be able to monitor desktops. So System Center Ops Manager 2007 must be very scalable.

RoadMap System Center Products 2007

Announcements:

• Monad will be called “Windows PowerShell”
• System Center will be Microsoft’s Service Desk solution.
• MOMv3 will be called “System Center Operations Manager 2007″
• SMSv4 will be called “System Center Configuration Manager 2007″
• System Center Essentials will bea product designed to deliver a complete solution to solve the systems management pains of small and medium sized customers.

Regards,

Stefan