Jonathan Hardwick : MMS 2005

Video from MMS 2005

jonathanh — Tue, 17 May 2005 08:05:00 GMT

Larry Gregory has posted a great video from the Microsoft Management Summit — well worth watching, even if you were there in person! It's the "Management" episode of his ISV Show series, so as well as walking around the conference floor and interviewing KirillT and BobKelly (in charge of engineering and selling our management products, respectively), Larry also talks to the ISVs who make up our partner ecosystem.

Don't worry, though — not only does the streaming video include a full transcript, it also has a set of bookmarks, so that you can jump straight to whichever bit you're interested in. And if you think you're hip to SDM* and DSI** and MOF***, watch the four minute introduction where he asks attendees what those acronyms stand for. Ouch. Clearly we've still got a lot of work to do in spreading the word...

*SDM = System Definition Model
**DSI = Dynamic Systems Initiative
***MOF = Microsoft Operations Framework

The MMS 2005 conference bag

jonathanh — Sun, 08 May 2005 00:10:00 GMT

I’ve had a couple requests for a picture of the MMS 2005 conference bag that I enthused over:

Microsoft Management Summit 2005: Day 2

jonathanh — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:49:00 GMT

Yesterday was naming day! The Project Formerly Known As Indy is now:

System Center Capacity Manager

We already have a nice little placeholder page on microsoft.com, and you can see Sabrina McBride giving our demo starting about 43 minutes into Kirill’s keynote video: 56 kbps, 100 kbps, or 300 kbps.

Thankfully no-one leaked the name, but now you can see why I was a little unsure about the acronym – just like Eileen Brown is. How long till customer start pronouncing it “scum”? And of course our initial product (SCCM 2006 Express Edition) leads to the unfortunate pronunciation of “scummy” :) So let me be the first to spread the meme that you should call it “CapMan” for short. Yes, capman. Look into my eyes. You are feeling sleeeeepy. Capman, capman, …

Ok, on to the reactions:

Mike Gunderloy says “Microsoft continues to try to make it impossible to remember all their server products”. Sorry! The only advice I can offer is to just remember “<foo> Manager”, for various values of “System Center <foo> Manager”…
Paul Thurrott at WindowsITPro comments “CTP [is] apparently Microsoft's new name for "public beta"”. Guilty as charged? Customers don’t like hearing “early beta”, but they do like “community technology previews” :)
Bruce Cowper is looking forward to getting his hands on the full toolkit – drop me a line Bruce, and we’ll see what we can do.
Rod Trent posts Ed Aldrich’s notes from the Tuesday keynote, and then complains that he can’t find me. Sorry Rod — after catching a cold, being up late and getting up early for demo rehearsals, and then spending the rest of the day gathering customer and analyst feedback (thanks guys!) I just headed back to my hotel and crashed. That, plus a cold, is also why this blog entry is a day late.
TechNet Guy says nice things about us, and also posts a couple of pictures from the conference. I’m really sorry I didn’t bring a camera to capture the backstage atmosphere before keynotes — there’s just an incredible amount of technology hidden behind those curtains, and a lot of people making it all happen. If you ever get an invite to see backstage, take it!

Finally, for those of you who couldn’t make it to MMS 2005, Kurt Shintaku announces “Return from MMS”. This will pack a lot of content from the conference into a one-day event in southern California on May 10th. Check out his post for more details.

Microsoft Management Summit 2005: Day 1

jonathanh — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 23:39:00 GMT

Best. Conference bag. Ever. I think we hit a home run on this one. It’s your typical nerdy backpack, but with two important differences:

It’s actually big enough to hold all your conference swag plus your laptop — very important for that first day before you can do some swag triage in your hotel room.
Pull out a telescoping handle and it’s a wheelie bag. Anyone who’s been to a big conference knows that there’s a lot of walking involved, and a lot of long days. I don’t care how svelte your laptop is, by the end of those days you’ll be tired of lugging it around. All conference bags should be wheelie bags!

Swag. Mmmmm, swag. There’s the usual pads and pens and water bottles, but the big item in the standard swag is a beta for System Center Data Protection Manager, and I mean big — there are no fewer than four CDs in that box. And then there’s the super-duper swag which you only get if you signed up for the Crisscross pre-event for system integrators and ISVs. I’ll list that swag in the order I think you should check it out, but I understand that other people may have different preferences :-)

“Indy” community tech preview. Yes, I know it doesn’t actually say “Indy” on the CD. And I know we didn’t call it Indy in the session where you learnt more about it. But shhhh, we’re only telling the rest of the world the real name tomorrow…
MOM 2005 and ISA 2004. Feel the love!
XBox games. I’m not sure what the overlap is between ISVs and XBox players, but based on the shark-like feeding frenzy around the XBox game table, I’m guessing there’s at least some!
Three golf-balls and what I believe is a score-card holder. Can anyone confirm this? None of the Indy guys here at the conference play golf, so we’re basically guessing here…

Microsoft Management Summit 2005: Day 0

jonathanh — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 01:38:00 GMT

If everything had gone according to plan I'd have arrived in Las Vegas by now, with a couple of hours to check into the hotel and then an evening of prep sessions and rehearsals. Of course, nothing ever quite goes according to plan, and a hydraulic leak in our plane's nose-wheel means that a bunch of us are still stuck in Seattle. Thankfully there's a choice of wifi providers at the airport, and I've staked a claim on one of the few seats in the waiting area that's near a power outlet...

Here's the Indy team's public schedule during MMS — I'll update this post if there are any changes:

Event	Date	Time	Location
Crisscross Indy talk	Mon	9:00-10:15	Breakers F&L
Self-paced labs	Mon	15:00-16:15	MB D
Indy break out SS03	Tue	10:15-11:30	LG I
Indy lab	Tue	11:45-13:00	MB C
Self-paced labs	Tue	14:15-15:30	MB D
Ask-The-Expert	Tue	14:15:30	ASE E
Self-paced labs	Wed	14:15-15:30	MB D
Self-paced labs	Thu	14:15-15:30	MB D
Indy lab	Thu	15:45-17:00	MB C

Microsoft Management Summit 2005: Day -2

jonathanh — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 17:33:25 GMT

As you can tell from the title, I’m starting this series of blog posts a little earlier than planned – in fact, I’m not even in Las Vegas yet. But our PR machine is cranking into action, and so journalists are already reporting on what we’ll be showing next week:

Microsoft to unveil a capacity mgmt. tool as part of broader mgmt. suite
By John Fontana
Network World Fusion, 04/14/05

Microsoft next week plans to introduce a limited beta of a tool for capacity planning that will be one piece of a broad suite of tools designed to help companies model, deploy and manage network resources.
…
And next week, Indy is expected to take on the System Center moniker when independent software vendors are given the first feature-complete beta code at the Management Summit. The Indy modeling technology was developed by Microsoft Research. It lets users model a server deployment based on characteristics such as the number of offices and users. A simulation of user workload can be run to determine system capacity, letting users experiment with different hardware, software configurations and user behavior before deploying anything on a live network.

Yep, that’s us :) And now the secret’s out that not only will we be demonstrating Indy at the “criss-cross” pre-event day, we’ll also be giving out code! One correction – it’s definitely not feature-complete, and we’re calling it a Community Technology Preview instead of a beta. We think that independent software vendors and systems integrators will be one of our core customer segments, and by giving them a CTP we hope to get valuable feedback from them in time to make a real difference in the final product.

In other MMS 2005 news, Reed Porter and Ron Crumbaker will also be blogging from the conference. Reed is even promising to podcast from MMS!

so if you see me seemingly talking to myself, don’t hesitate to come over, say hi, and let me record your impressions of the conference

No podcasts from me, but I’ll be one of the guys wandering around in a black t-shirt with “Microsoft Indy” on the front, and “How well do you perform?” on the back.

Blogging at MMS 2005

jonathanh — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 08:54:00 GMT

Rod Trent asks if anyone will be blogging at MMS 2005 next week. I certainly will! In fact, I’ve been “volunteered” to provide status updates from the conference for the rest of my team back in Redmond, so I’m hoping that I can repurpose most of that content :-) Sounds like there’ll be a good party on the Wednesday night, too.

Updates:

I've created an MMS 2005 category (and RSS feed) for future blog posts.
Rod's posted more details about the myITforum party

Where to learn more about Indy if you're NOT going to MMS 2005

jonathanh — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:53:00 GMT

A reader asks:

What about those of us that cannot attend MMS?
Is there anything available that describes what Indy does?

Hmmm, let’s see. Right now we’ve got no official web presence, partly because we don’t have a name. Both situations should be remedied within the next month, and I think we’re promising a white paper by MMS — I just hope that I don’t get roped in to write it! In the meantime you can read about what we showed last year, and the analyst’s reactions.

Indy was also demonstrated in Bill Gates’ keynote at IT Forum 2004. Here’s a smattering of news stories from last November that mention it:

Gates expands on Microsoft's IT management vision
“In a demonstration during Gates' presentation, Microsoft plans to show how the health and task information provided by server software and used by a capacity planning tool code-named Indy can help an organization merge two IT environments”
Microsoft releases management tools, expands on DSI model
“Microsoft currently does health models using MOM management packs and won’t start wading into configuration and task models until the release of Whidbey and with a capacity planning tool called Indy, that will ship with the second version of System Center sometime in the Longhorn timeframe”
Microsoft IT Forum Day One
“A capacity planning application named Indy was also demonstrated. Not only can this application suggest a graphical topology but it can also run simulations against it”

I’ll add that we’re not just shipping in the Longhorn timeframe – we’re shipping earlier than that as well. There’ll be a full product road-map at MMS, or you can just stay tuned to the “Capacity Planning” (RSS) category of this blog.

Tomorrow I’ll dive into capacity planning a little deeper.

Come check out our new capacity-planning product at MMS 2005

jonathanh — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 08:34:00 GMT

Ok, so we still don’t have a name, but we did just hit feature-complete for our product’s first milestone. And we’ll be flaunting our stuff (i.e. demo’ing all our cool features) at MMS 2005 in a month’s time.

In fact, if you’re a systems integrator and you’ve signed up for the Crisscross Pre-Event day, you’ll see even more of Indy. What is the Crisscross Pre-Event day? I’m glad that you asked, because I’ve got the marketing blurb right here – note the highlighted session!

This year, The Microsoft Management Summit (April 18-22, Las Vegas) is adding a one day briefing held April 18th to help System Integrators deliver value to their customers in the areas of compliance, line of business, asset management, and heterogeneity. These sessions will cover the integration efforts and value of adding 3rd party tools for MOM 2005 and SMS 2003 into your management deployments and compliment your service portfolios. The event is FREE but registration is required.

Those interested in attending should email msmp@microsoft.com and request a nomination form. You may nominate yourself and any of your company’s consultants.

Sessions offered:

Indy Product Preview - Presented by Microsoft
Heterogeneous Management and Monitoring using SMS and MOM – Presented by Vintela
Asset Management – Presented by PS’Soft
Unrivaled SAP Performance Management with Horizon and MOM 2005 – Presented by Tidal Software
Regulatory Compliance – Presented by Manakoa

For more MMS 2005 news, check out the official blog. And yes, the drive to feature-complete is the reason for the lack of updates here!

Register now for Microsoft Management Summit 2005!

jonathanh — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 09:53:00 GMT

Ok, I know that I said I’d cut down on the SMS and MOM blogging, but really, these quick posts just write themselves. Registration is now open for MMS 2005, so if you’re at all interested in what Microsoft is doing to make it easier to manage computers, go sign up today at http://www.mms2005.com/! As in previous years, it’s at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas: I know, I know, same old restaurants, but those sharks never get boring. And make sure to follow Martin Dey’s official MMS 2005 blog to answer all your questions about how to spend your time between April 18th-22nd.

I’ll probably be there with the Product Formerly Known As Indy – we hit our first big coding milestone last month, so now we have real running production code to show people! Anyone want to organize a management bloggers get-together at MMS? Rod, you going?

MMS 2005 blog and announcements

jonathanh — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 03:47:00 GMT

If you’re not reading the myITforum newsletter, you probably missed the announcement of the official MMS 2005 blog. It’s being written by Martin Dey, the overall organizer of the Microsoft Management Summit 2005, where we talk about all things MOM and SMS. Expect more news as we get closer to April 18th – see you in Las Vegas!