It's been a crazy last week or so. 30 or 40 enterprise Microsoft Operations Manager users just arrived to get a look at v3 of the product. I'm sitting in a room with them right now as they are getting a presentation from the MOM product team about new features. They have plenty of questions/requests about the future and very interesting comments about the 2005 version. Everyone seems happy to be here and ready to work. They are from universities, banks, retailers, military units and they use MOM to monitor server health but there is a lot of desktop monitoring functionality on the way which will make the product even more interesting. For this week they will be running through usage scenarios on environments that we have built at the EEC to give suggestions about what is wack and what is cool.
    At the EEC we spent last week getting ready for them. It was a week of controlled chaos but overall it was fun. We successfully built 11 environments consisting of a total of 121 servers and 50 or so clients. OSes were Windows Server 03 SP1 and XP SP2. Other Software used was Exchange SP1, ISA, Indigo, SQL Server 05, .NET Framework 2.0, Virtual Server and PC and many other specialized tools. I came up with a plan, got suggestions from the team on how to network and streamline better and we got started. We used RIS to deploy OSes to servers and automated  DCPROMO and IP configuration. ADS was used for the clients. Some other processes were automated such as importing certificates and moving files but there were things which needed to be done manually like setting up Yukon to work with specialized apps that we need it to work with. 
    The plan had to be fluid to accommodate changes that popped up as we and MOM discovered changes that needed to be made. The challenge was finding the balance between everything: Modifying the plan to accommodate changes and being firm as to what it is too late change. Writing scripts to automate processes and doing things manually. Asking someone else to do something or just doing it yourself. I learned there is a thin line between everything and tightrope walking it is the key to keeping yourself, your team members, the product team, and the customers visiting to test the product happy. The interesting day will be Wednesday when we have to reimage the machines to get ready for a second round of customers arriving on Thursday after the Mon-Tues guys leave. Check back to see how everything goes.

    In other news, there has been an increasing amount of trash-talking going on about the Trojans since of course there are lots of graduates from everywhere here at MS. People are saying this and that, but I just humor them and talk my trash; all in good fun of course. People are not satisified unless we absolutely blow everyone out of the water in each game but they should be thanking us for making their games even worth watching. And Texas may be a pretty good team, but they have only one weapon. Virginia Teach may be a pretty good team but we beat them squarely and routinely. Need I continue. Anyway I'm excited that SC is coming to town this weekend to play UW. I've already got my tickets and I will be there in cardinal and gold. Plus there is a rally the night before which should be fun.