Jonathan Hardwick : SMS and MOM

The MOM team start blogging

jonathanh — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:42:00 GMT

The program managers for Microsoft Operations Manager have started their own team blog, and they already have post categories that hint at what's to come. I've been working closely with this team over the past few months, so it's great to see them getting the blogging bug — go say hi! And to answer Rod's question, we love bloggers :)

Category: SMS and MOM

NYT article about Eric Rudder... and other Microsoft bloggers

jonathanh — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:05:00 GMT

Tomorrow’s New York Times is running an article by Steve Lohr entitled “A Front-Runner at Microsoft, but There’s No Race Yet” (registration required). The article is mostly about Eric Rudder, Senior VP of the Server and Tools division and about five clicks up the org chart from me. Here’s the bit that made me smile:

More than a thousand engineers and product managers in Mr. Rudder's unit have started blogs in the last couple of years to explain what Microsoft is doing and to field comments and criticism from customers and programmers outside the company.

What the article doesn’t mention is that Eric accomplished this partly by starting his own blog – even though it’s still mostly empty. Microsoft is very much a “show me” culture: PMs don’t trust other teams until they see working code, and devs don’t believe it’s safe to blog until their VP starts one. The Channel 9 video probably helps too :) So a big thankyou to Eric for leading the way

And while tracking that down I also discovered that Bill Anderson just resumed blogging yesterday! To compensate for taking three months off, he managed two posts in one lunchtime, updating everyone on the organizational changes in SMS, and talking about some job openings on the team.

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

New in this month's management updates: Windows Update Services and System Center Reporting Manager

jonathanh — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:53:00 GMT

Earlier today I posted this month’s updates to the Management Updates blog. There’s news about MMS 2005 (of course), details of upcoming webcasts on various MOM and SMS topics, and also a couple of new categories: System Center Reporting Manager (upcoming product) and Windows Update Services (the next generation of Software Update Services).

I think I need to do these followup posts faster, though – Rod Trent already found the SCRM post!

This month's updates on SMS, MOM, and now Virtual Server

jonathanh — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 01:20:00 GMT

I’ve posted this month’s roll-ups of all the news and announcements about SMS and MOM on the Management Updates blog. What’s new is that we now include information about Virtual Server. Big thanks to Jonathan Lau for putting the original newsletter together every month.

SMS Inventory Tool for Dell Updates: dull name, but actually a big deal

jonathanh — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:04:00 GMT

The SMS team just shipped their Inventory Tool for Dell Updates, a free download for SMS 2003 . This is another one of those descriptive-and-boring product names, but it actually hides something that’s pretty damn cool, and will ease the lives of many a systems administrator.

Here’s how it works: let’s say that you’re already using SMS, and you’ve got lots of Dell computers – a common scenario. But you’re also really fed up with having to keep every one of those computers up to date with the latest BIOS, firmware, and driver updates from Dell. Wouldn’t it be nice if SMS could scan them all to see what updates each computer required, download the latest Dell update catalog on a predetermined schedule, and then push out the right updates to the right computers? Well, now it can! Dell is calling this “One Click” management (which shows that they still know how to come up with good names), and you can also download it from their Microsoft Systems Management page. See Eileen Brown’s post for more details.

And there’s an important factor here that a lot of people seem to have missed. And no, I’m not talking about the geeky sysadmin coolness of having a single solution to manage updates to hardware, OS, and applications. I’m talking about how two radically different corporate cultures sat down together, came up with a solution that benefits all of our customers, and got it out the door in such a short time. When you think about everything that has to happen for Dell patches to go through Microsoft QA, be digitally signed, packaged up for SMS, and then get distributed out from a central site — that’s the kind of thing that touches a lot of internal teams on both sides. Kudos to everyone involved for making it happen!

SMS and MOM bloggers from around the world

jonathanh — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 21:55:00 GMT

We’re really ramping up some worldwide blog coverage of Microsoft systems management products – as well as Eileen Brown from the UK, we’ve got Jeff Alexander blogging from Australia, and Shitanshu from India. And it sounds like Eileen’s “blogging bootcamp” (as taught at our internal sales event by Betsy, Mike, and Scoble) was a big hit, so there should be even more bloggers showing up soon. I’ll keep the “Blogs: SMS & MOM” list on my home page updated.

I’m also a bit annoyed about missing the perfect opportunity for organizing a bloggers get-together at the sales event, since as a product-group architect I already had an invite to one of their evening events. Instead no-one knew who I was, because this was the night before they heard this year’s plans for systems management and Indy! Ah well, maybe next year – what do you think, guys? Blogger Party at Envision 2006?

Welcome James Morey to the SMS & MOM blogging scene!

jonathanh — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 01:32:00 GMT

Ok, first I said that you really only needed to subscribe to Eileen Brown and Rod Trent for all of your SMS and MOM needs. Then my bosses’ boss started blogging, and it would be foolhardy of me to tell you to ignore him! Now James Morey has arrived with “Jimbo’s MOM 2005 WebLog”. Just check out his first six posts:

Phew. Makes me glad that I got out when I did – the blogging competition is getting a lot tougher around here

Blogging up the management hierarchy

jonathanh — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 03:49:00 GMT

My “grand-manager” Brad Anderson has started a blog on myITforum. Although it’s really half a blog, since he’s sharing it with Bill Anderson. And of course he hasn’t actually posted anything yet . But these are minor quibbles — if you want to hear from Mr SMS himself, watch that space! (via Rod Trent)

What’s especially cool is that my great-great-grand-manager Bob Muglia has also been making noises about starting a blog, and of course my great-great-great-grand-manager Eric Rudder already has one, although updates are pretty rare. I wonder what happens when your entire management chain is blogging?

Why we need process, not just tools

jonathanh — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 17:33:00 GMT

In case you missed this story when it hit the headlines last month, one of the UK’s major government departments lost the use of most of its desktop PCs for nearly a week. Now we’re seeing more details on the causes of the outage:

EDS has admitted that an error by one of its computer operators during a Microsoft Windows upgrade caused 40,000 PCs at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to crash last month.
…
EDS said several steps have already been taken to avoid this happening again, including increased checks by EDS' senior engineers and management staff when such upgrades are implemented.
(Via Rod Trent)

This should serve as a reminder for all of us that THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET. If you’ve got a really tough job to do (upgrading 40,000 PCs), then merely having a great tool is not enough — you also need good processes in place to make sure that it gets used correctly. Otherwise, your putative silver bullet just becomes another way to shoot yourself in the foot.

EDS are one of the few contracting companies big enough to take on a job like this, and they have a constantly evolving body of processes to stop just such an event from happening. If even they can get it wrong, then the rest of us should really start paying attention.

A good place to start is ITIL, a set of best practices for IT service management that is getting some real traction in the industry, especially in Europe. ITIL is designed to be vendor-neutral, so that we can all share a common language while still allowing vendors to customize it to fit their particular products. The Microsoft-customized version of ITIL is the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which I’ve mentioned here a couple of times. If you can find a MOF or ITIL course near you being taught by a qualified instructor, I highly recommend making the time to attend it. The specific course I took was MOF Essentials, and it was both a great learning experience and a lot of fun.

Where to get this week's SMS and MOM news

jonathanh — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:19:00 GMT

As I said, I’m going to start leaving it to Rod Trent and Eileen Brown to handle the weekly news about MOM and SMS. So go visit Rod to learn about:

Registration for MMS 2005 (April 18^th-22^nd 2005 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas!)
Vintela’s Request for Input for New MOM Extension to non-Windows Systems
MOM Management Pack and Product Connector Catalog
Who is part of the SMS Alliance?

And Eileen to learn about:

After all that I really don’t have much to add, other than this warm’n’fuzzy case study of how MOM 2005 was deployed within Microsoft:

Detailed discussion of how Microsoft IT upgraded its MOM 2000 SP1 infrastructure to MOM 2005. Microsoft IT uses MOM 2005 out-of-the-box to manage 5,600 servers worldwide. They deployed MOM 2005 in half the time required to deploy MOM 2000 SP1. In the process, they’ve begun to consolidate servers and monitoring staff to reduce TCO. Savings to date include 40 percent reduction in monitoring support staff and over 30 percent reduction in servers.

I’m guessing this came from the MSCOM Operations Tools Team — check out their Collector Condundrum series (parts I, II, III, IV, and V) for more details.

Winding down the SMS & MOM content on this blog, ramping up Indy instead

jonathanh — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 09:12:00 GMT

Back when I started out, I was the only blogger in the WEMD organization, and I took it upon myself to post our weekly news, as well as the monthly “Management Updates” newsletters. Now there are nine other blogs in the SMS & MOM category on the left of my page, and I feel like we’re in pretty good shape. So I’m going to start winding down the SMS & MOM posts, and concentrating on our upcoming product (codenamed “Indy”) instead.

I’ll still be posting occasional news, but only if Rod Trent or Eileen Brown haven’t got there first — if you’re just reading me for SMS & MOM news, I strongly suggest subscribing to their feeds as well :-). Plus it sounds like Rod is making some waves with his blog hosting service on myITforum; hopefully he’ll be bringing a lot more bloggers into the systems management community!

Monthly update on SMS & MOM

jonathanh — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 02:16:00 GMT

I’ve posted another month’s worth of marketing prose over at the Management Updates blog, but hopefully you’ve already seen most of these announcements before:

SMS

SMS 2003 OS Deployment Feature Pack
SMS 2003 Device Management Feature Pack
Using SMS 2003 to Distribute Office 2003
Upcoming webcast on creating highly available SMS sites

MOM

MOM 2005 Management Pack Development Guide
MOM 2000 Management Pack for Routing and Remote Access
MOM 2005 Active Directory Management Pack Guide
MOM 2005 Case Studies

Solutions for Management

Business Desktop Deployment Solution Accelerators
Upcoming webcast on zero-touch deployment

Other News

Management announcesments at IT Forum 2004
Microsoft and Dell announce strategic development partnership
Release of Virtual Server Migration Toolkit (VSMT)

More SMS and MOM resources

jonathanh — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 23:54:00 GMT

Eileen Brown has burst onto blogs.msdn.com with a torrent of SMS and MOM content – check out her Systems Management Software category.

And if you’re not subscribed to MVP Rod Trent’s blog, you’ve missed out on these stories over the past month:

The SMS team asking for feedback on their new OS Deployment Feature Pack.
The myITForum code repository, including SMS custom reports and scripts.
The 10th anniversary of SMS.
Nominations for MVPs (here’s the current list of Microsoft management MVPs).

Finally, the msgoodies blog isn’t just about Microsoft management software – they also talk about all the other infrastructure goodies, like Active Directory and Windows Server (found via the Exchange blog).

Downloaded the Windows Update Services beta? Try the WUS wiki!

jonathanh — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 21:15:00 GMT

This deserves a post of its own because it’s so cool. One thing I missed in my announcements from IT Forum 2004 is that you can now get a free download of WUS (Windows Update Services) as part of the beta open evaluation program. Naturally this has the standard feedback options of any Microsoft beta: a private beta newsgroup, and bug reporting via BetaPlace. But look what the community has added to the mix — the WUS wiki! This lets WUS users work together to come up with troubleshooting tips, deployment guides, and a what’s new list. Very, very cool. What can a community do for you?

(found via Rod Trent)