This week Microsoft is holding the MMS 2006 event in San Diego, California between April 24th-April 28th 2006. As usual, the floor was full with attendees ranging from GISVs, Enterprise IT Management and Developers. Bob Muglia (BobMu), Sr. VP Server and Tools Business (where we fall under), did the Keynote presentation. The biggest announcement he made was around the the new branding for the Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Systems Management Server (SMS), and the new product into the family "Service Desk". These three products will be under the new branding called, "System Center". MOM will be called, "System Center-Operations Manager", SMS will be called, "System Center-Configuration Manager" and "System Center-Service Desk". I like how these products are coming together even when it comes to branding.

One other announcement was around "Monad" - the really cool Shell Scripting Engine that rides on top of and exposes .Net 2.0 namespaces. If you have not tried it already, I can assure you, you are missing something. Exchange "12" (our new Exchange Server) will completely leverage Monad to perform Exchange Tasks. The beauty of this approach is you can perform all Exchange tasks (even bulk ones) using Monad scripting rather than E12 MMC console. A huge time saver for Exchange Admins. Monad will be the new management vehicle to executing tasks in our upcoming products. So, if you're an admin and have not seen Monad yet, you should give that a shot and get familiar with its programming interface. The official name for "Monad" is "PowerShell". Beta bits of PowerShell can be gotten here: http://blogs.msdn.com/monad/. I'm excited about PowerShell - I can already see tonnes of 3PVs building tools on top of PowerShell.

My division, DPE have a booth at MMS where we had our partners pay a visit and do sessions and demos of their products. From end-customers perspective, the biggest attraction is that we are giving away 9 XBOX 360s and one Media Center PC away at our booth. Those XBOX 360s are fully loaded with games and accessories.

Come visit us at the booth.

ciao
Nagi