I am very excited and very honored to be a part of the new Because It’s Everybody’s Business campaign that Microsoft has kicked off today. As a part of the campaign, I will be blogging regularly on the TechNet along with a number of other Experts from the Microsoft community. You can keep up with all the experts here, or you can see what is going on in the world of System Center here. I hope you find time to join us as there will be great information regarding the many new products and technologies that Microsoft will be releasing over the coming year.

If you haven’t been to HouseParty.com before now is the time to head on over. They are accepting applications from people interested in hosting their own Windows 7 Launch Party. The countries that the House Parties are available in are limited, so check it out to see if you are eligible and if you are get signed up soon.

You can find out more information here:

Global Windows® 7 Launch Party

Good luck and happy partying,

Tim

It might weight more than most other laptops, but what a sweet way to start using Windows 7.

Dual 15.4” screens…Awesome!

I am very honored and proud to have been chosen by Microsoft to host a new IT Manager/IT Pro series of live Webcast Chats that will air bi-weekly starting in August. This is proving to be quite and undertaking as it is not easy to try to cover all the different products that Microsoft has in only 24 chats per year. Picking and choosing where to go, what to cover and what I feel will be most important to IT Manager’s minds on a month by month basis is extremely challenging. I’ll update further as the process starts to take shape.

I have to say that it has been an absolute pleasure working with the team that Microsoft has put together to support this series. They are unbelievably dedicated, knowledgeable and really supportive of getting this whole operation up and going. I am really looking forward to the coming year.

I have been working with (and in) the IT community for many many years now, currently working with Culminis, a Microsoft user group support organization. I have pushed within the Culminis organization for a more open and embracing attitude in an effort to move beyond the scope that Microsoft would have us limit ourselves to, so that we can truly be about community as a whole. Unfortunately, these requests have fallen on deaf ears.

To be perfectly honest, this is not just a Microsoft/Culminis issue (I know there are plenty of people out there who love to see anything that Microsoft does not do perfectly and immediately brand them as evil), but rather a shortsighted nature that seems to be quite prevalent within the IT culture as a whole. Every IT company that I know of has set up “community” sites as a means of support, yet as soon as a person’s needs go beyond that company’s product line the “community” quickly shuts them out. You will not find a link on HP’s community page to IBM’s “community” page, not a link on Apple’s “community” page to Microsoft’s “community” page. They are indeed communities, but they are very small sheltered communities. These limited viewpoint pages had a time and place, but I would argue that the time for them has past. It is time to step outside the control of the corporate heads who care not about communities and support other than as a means of making and proving an ROI.

As a result of this, myself and a group of friends from many areas of various IT communities have launched a new a site: www.itcommunityportal.com which is built to truly be by the IT Community for the IT Community. We do not discriminate based on if you are an administrator or a developer, we do not care if you use Linux, Mac OS, or Windows, we care only that you are a member of the IT Community at large and that you have a desire to help us learn and grow.

Please come over and check us out: www.itcommunityportal.com . If you have web site creation skills we would REALLY love to have you drop us a line as we are trying to improve the functionality and capabilities of the new site as quickly as we can.

Since I spend a great deal fo my time on here discussing Microsoft’s System Center products, I felt that I should make you all aware of a GREAT giveaway they are doing over at www.myITforum.com. They are having a raffle for a full attendance pass to MMS 2009 (www.mms-2009.com) donated by Secure Vantage Technologies, but you the raffle ends April 15th so get over there FAST! More info on the raffle (rules, fine print, you know the drill) can be found here: http://www.myitforum.com/contest/swag/mms2009.asp#.

Good luck!!!

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

I love TheOnion.com as a whole. They have some incredibly creative videos and the technology based ones usually hit WAY too close to home.

Plus I really AM worried about the children who turn into mutants during the apocalypse. What if we are teaching them skills today that can be used against us in the future???

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I really wanted to sub-title this entry as: "Microsoft wants me to run how many System Center servers?!?!?" so I will.

I have been working with System Center Service Manager (Microsoft’s foray into the service desk arena), in some form or another, since it’s original announcement and beta release going on 2 years ago. Therefore, I am very excited that Service Manager is looking like it should see a release sometime in 2009 or 2010. And while I have found the latest iteration of Service Manager to be an excellent product (you can get info about downloading the latest beta of SM here: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager.aspx), what I really want to get into today is not SM’s capabilities (these may change over the next 12 or so months at least a little, plus most of it is still under NDA anyway) but the basic underlying architecture that Microsoft has chosen. Service Manager is built using the System Center Configuration Manager database. At first glance this may seem to be a good thing, Microsoft has found a way to consolidate databases making it possible to run 2 products SCSM and SCCM using only 1 database. But…The old (and new) version of Forefront, Microsoft’s anti-malware product, is built on the Operations Manager database. And again I hear you say "Great! Now I can run 4 products with only 2 databases." And once I again I say, "But wait there’s more." We still need WSUS to complete the management puzzle. So now we can manage our entire network using Microsoft’s System Center suite of products using (by my count) 5 products and a bare minimum of 6 servers, some of which may be virtualized against Microsoft’s recommendations. Awesome! Except I’m a mid-sized business so use Systems Center Essentials…

Oops!

So what are we Mid-Biz’s to do? As of right now I am sorry to say that I cannot find a way to put all the pieces together so that they fit. Obviously, for a mid-biz 6 servers just for management is not a realistic solution and that’s not even mentioning the overkill that SCCM and SCOM would be for someone with under 500 clients on their network. As I covered back in September, making SCE and Forefront work together is very possible, but trying to add Service Manager to the mix just does not work well right now.

I am a big fan of Microsoft’s newest management product System Center Essentials 2007. SCE is aimed at the SMB market which is a huge segment of the market here in the Tulsa area. SCE shares a great deal of its bits with System Center Operations Manager 2007, which means that when updates for SCOM2007 are released they often effect those of us running SCE.

That being said, 2 new Management Packs for SCOM07 were released at the end of last week.

1. The Operations Manager 2007 Data Warehouse Library and

2. The Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack Update,

The management pack update actually updates a number of the Management Packs that were included with the default install of SCE. I wanted to be sure to run them installed for a few days before recommending them to anyone else, and I fell confident now in saying that after having them installed for the past 5 days they work with no issues that I have found.

Until later,

Tim