Cloudy with a chance of Licensing
Latest news on Microsoft licensing, Cloud, and AI
Office 2003 MUI Packs can be nearly as tricky to pin down as those for Vista.
Now with Office 2007, you need to purchase the Office Multi Language Pack via Volume Licensing (around £75).
If you need to downgrade to Office 2003, then you are entitled to downgrade the MUI pack too.
Configuration Manager:
This is the replacement for SMS 2003 and is used to comprehensively assess, deploy, and update your servers, clients, and devices, across physical and virtual machines as well as mobile devices. Config. Manager provides Asset Intelligence giving organizations continuous visibility of their hardware/software assets, where they are and who’s using them.
It can show how many copies of a particular program have been deployed, which machines they’re on and which people actually use the software. This information can then be used at renewal time to help decide how many copies are needed for the next year etc.
Software Update Management is often the main reason that people look at System Center Config Manager. Keeping all the various bits of software in an Enterprise fully up to date with patches is very important and also very difficult! Using SCCM you can deploy patches & updates for Microsoft products, 3rd party applications, custom LOB (Line of Business) applications, hardware drivers and more to servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices.
The new feature of Desired Configuration Management enables organization to increase desktop stability and security by assessing the compliance of computers with regards to things such as “whether the correct Microsoft Windows operating system versions are installed and configured appropriately, all required applications are installed and configured correctly, optional applications are configured appropriately, and whether prohibited applications are installed.”
Using SCCM for Software Package Deployment can make things a lot easier! This simplifies the task of distributing software packages to physical and virtual machines (servers, desktops, laptops and mobile devices). You can centrally define how and when these packages will run on client machines, installing the software with no user intervention.
Next Steps:
Now you’re got an idea of what it can do, I’m sure you can’t wait to get it set up in your Test & Development system so:
Pricing & Licensing:
There is a single licence for System Center Config Manager Server, Management Licence (ML) for Servers (Std and Enterprise) and a Management Licence for Clients.
An Enterprise Server ML is required for full application and server desired configuration management, including the proactive management of systems for configuration settings that follow an industry-leading framework for managing information in changing regulatory and business environments, while a Standard Server ML is limited to operating system and basic workload desired configuration management.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (SCOM) is the replacement for MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager). It is an the end-to-end service-management product that helps organizations increase efficiency while enabling greater control of the IT environment.
Management Packs are available to add extra functionality into SCOM 2007, these can be downloaded or you can create your own.
The Distributed Application Designer is a graphical wizard to help IT administrators quickly create health models and MPs (Management Packs) for their IT Services. The Management Pack Authoring Console is a graphical tool used to help IT administrators and developers build MPs for their custom applications and other technology components. The Operations Manager 2007 Software Development Kit (SDK) provides programming interfaces so developers can more deeply integrate with and automate Operations Manager 2007.
SCOM isn’t restricted to monitoring Windows environments, it’s possible to monitor HP-UX, Solaris, Red Hat & SUSE Linux by using the Cross Platforms Extension beta.
Download a trial of System Center Operations Manager 207 here.
What is Microsoft System Center? What does it do? How much does System Center cost?
These, and more, are questions I get at work on a regular basis both from customers and our internal sales guys so I’m going to try and clear it up a little here if I can..
The System Center family helps you to manage physical and virtual environments across data centers, desktops and devices and includes:
System Center Essentials (SCE)
I was going to put together one post for the whole family, but it was turning into a huge, unwieldy beast so I’ve broken it down into separate posts for each family member, links are above..(not all the posts are available yet but please bear with me!)
It’s the 2nd Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference and we’ve already got info on SQL 2010 (Killimanjaro) thanks to the wonderful Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet !!!
Despite SQL 2008 only just being in the price files for customers to buy, the SQL team are revealing details on the next incarnation, SQL 2010 codename Killimanjaro. Preview builds will be around in the first half of 2009, and then SQL Server 2010 will be available in the first of the following year.
“Kilimanjaro is set to include self-service analysis tools (codenamed “Gemini”) that Microsoft is saying will allow information workers to better “slice and dice data and create their own BI (business intelligence) applications and assets to share and collaborate on from within the familiar, everyday Microsoft Office productivity tools they already use.”” We will also see further add-ins to Excel as well as deeper Sharepoint integration, making it esaier for users to share their own BI analyses.
I’ve got an HTC Diamond, which of course draws a number of comparisons to the iPhone. I have to say that I can’t think of any real reasons not to choose the HTC Diamond.
Yes, the iPhone come with 8/16GB compared to the Diamond’s 4GB, but really-when do you need more than that? I’ve got an old school 40GB iPod that I’ve still not filled to even 50% yet..and my music collection, if all digitized) would fill over twice that I reckon yet still I’m more than happy with the 4GB my Diamond offers me. I’ve got plenty of albums on there along with a crazy number of pictures of my son AND various documents for work (excel, word, pdf etc), still with GB’s of room!
The styling of the HTC Diamond with it’s big screen and sleek, shiny black casing make it at least as attractive as Apple’s alternative. We could get stuck in debating the variances of design for days and never get anywhere so let’s move on. Let’s move on to the “Things I can’t believe the iPhone doesn’t do” section; these are all major omissions but not always well known….
The iPhone doesn’t include/support:
Video camera
MMS (Picture Messaging)
Copying & pasting
SMS (text message) forwarding
File transfer via bluetooth
Being used as a modem, connecting to a laptop to give internet access.
Of these, certainly MMS and Bluetooth file transfer are available in even the most basic handsets these days..I reckon it must take more effort to NOT include these features! 🙂
The lack of copy & paste functionality and it’s inability to forward text messages also prevent it from making any real impact in the business world.
Another element I love which pits it against the iPhone, is the fact that you don’t really need to use the stylus. I can navigate menus, turn features on/off and even compose emails and text messages, all without the stylus 🙂
Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 is a great product..it really paves the way for a truly connected, more efficient, easier to live in world of business.
**Update** New features announced by Microsoft! See my post here
There will be a new version announced in November 2008 and released in January 2009, this will be Office Communications Server 2007 R2and one major difference will be it’s transition to a 64bit ONLY platform a la Exchange 2007. This version will transpose your voicemails to text so you can still access them even if in a meeting (or the quiet car of a train..) among other new features.
OCS 2007 R2 will also have more Telephony style features including the ability to hunt groups…
There will then be a completely new version-OCS 2009/2010 (probably 2010)-released to coincide with the availability of Office 14. This along with the expected release of Sharepoint 2010, will help bring a more unified feel to the Office family. It is also expected that this new version will contain inbuilt translation services so if you receive an email in say Spanish, Exchange can read it back to you in English 🙂
I’ve seen on The UC Guy’s blog via Mary Jo Foley’s post over at ZDNet that there are more new features expected in OCS 2007 R2 including:
“..a telephony queue system should be included, and will give people dialing in to the system, access to a touchtone menu to have their calls forwarded to the right department/person and so on.”
I can also say that there will be a Boss/Admin console..
Here are some links to my other OCS 2007 related posts:
This year’s PDC 2008 is going to bring with it a whole host of new things for the industry from Windows 7 advancements, cloud computing updates, new projects and more. I’m going to use this post as a central repository for the various different bits of information that we will see.
One of the new things that the PDC 2008 will reveal is “Project Velocity“, Microsoft’s main memory distributed caching framework which was “built to meet the performance, scale, latency, and availability requirements of large scale enterprise and web applications”.
“Oslo” is also present at the PDC 2008. There are 5 sessions around Oslo which is a family of new technologies to enable “data-driven development and execution of services and applications.” It “provides a language for creating schemas, queries, views, and values” and “uses schematized data stored in the “Oslo” repository to drive the development and execution of applications and services”.
A link that shows all the sessions is available here.
There’s a whole host of things being revealed at the PDC this year, here are links ot my other PDC 2008 related posts:
Windows 7 is Microsoft’s next hotly anticipated release and there is now information that changes will be made to help it support Parallel Processing.
Microsoft have already stated that deep-level changes between Vista & Windows 7 will be get to a minimum as a way to ensure driver and application compatibiity; and if they pull it off, Windows 7 will have a much better start to life than poor old Vista 🙂
The downside to this is that they can’t play around with Win32 (Windows Core) too much, and that is going to limit what can be down with regards to Parallel Processing. However, at this year’s PDC (Professional Developers Conference), there is a session entitled “Parallel Symposium: Addressing the Hard Problems with Concurrency” and the session decription contains the phrase “Hear about the key architectural changes Microsoft is making to Windows to enable the efficient execution of parallel software.”, which shows the Redmond giant has clearly got something up it’s sleeve.
Many thanks to Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet for this info. She’s also got some words from Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer as to what’s on the drawing board.
Again, anyone attending the PDC please feel free to leave some comments if you hear anything blog worthy!
Microsoft’s viral ad videos can be great fun..(and informative too) so I’m gonna try and collect as many as I can into this post…so we’ve all got a central place for them..
Let me know which is your favourite!
**New Video** for PDC 2008
Shoe Circus-Seinfeld Vista Ad 1
New Family-Seinfeld Vista Ad 2
Bill Gates-Last Day Video Diary – This one is truly brilliant! I think this is my fave video of the lot..
Microsoft UK did a set of 4 videos called “The Office Values” which featured Ricky Gervais as David Brent, here they are:
This video was taken 100% seriously by some people out there and used as another excuse to have a pop at Microsoft, but I’m pretty sure it’s tongue is very firmly in it’s cheek:
This video is from the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2008, which was over in Houston. I was there this year but I only thought to record this after it had happened (typical!) and this is the only clip I can find on Youtube:
Bit of trivia for you, I very nearly accidentally tripped up Alison Watson over in Houston at the expo! I wonder what I’d be doing now if that had happened?!
Thought I’d add the EBS Pimp My Infrastructure vid here too
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 