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System Center Essentials 2007
David Mills did a session on System Center Essentials 2007 today, at the Airlift. Essentials will replace the former Operations Manager 2007 Workgroup edition and is targeted at the Small Business Server (SBS) and upcoming Codename "Centro" server customers. There will be a hard support limit, supporting up to 30 servers and a maximum of 500 clients. One of the great new features is a Daily Health Report, delivered by email, telling the administrator status about update compliance, problems in their infrastructure, etcetera. Upgrades will be available from the OpsMgr 2005 full and Workgroup product and also supported from the current Windows Server Updates Services v2 and upcoming v3 products.David also hinted at a System Center Update Tool which could add extra support for software installation on the area of adding Transforms to MSI packages. SC Update Tool might be delivered after the Essentials RTM release. Both Vista RTM and the upcoming Longhorn Server will be supported as clients. A very cool feature is the fact that Management Packs that are written for Operations Manager 2007 will work in Essentials. Licensing was not really disclosed, but will focus more on the platform than on a fee per server. Currently, the product is at the beta 2 milestone publicly available, but the Release Candidate will see the light this quarter (Q1 2007). General availability and RTM will be before the summer, in the first half of 2007.
For Services providers, there will be a Management Pack connecting the downstream Essentials installation to an upstream full Operations Manager 2007 installation. Services provides will be provided with all-ready reports and tools to facilitate customers with a managed solution. This "Connected Services Provider Framework" is currently under way as a TAP program with selected partners. David also said that the next version of Office Sharepoint Server, codenamed "Cougar" will bring tighter integration for the reports.