Sorry it took so long for me to sift through my notes. Rod posted Ed's notes from the keynote yesterday. Since he covered all of that, I'll focus on the SMS State of the Union address that Brad and Bill Anderson gave shortly after. The State of the Union address has been the highlight of MMS for me since I began coming 4 years ago.
The first news item from the presentation was that Bill would in fact be moving to lead the SMS v5 product that will be in development in parallel with SMS v4. The downside is that we won't be seeing him as much. We'll miss you Bill!
PSS stats for SMS look good. Call volume is down 33% since the release of SP1. Only nine (NINE!) hotfixes have been released since the release of SP1. The pre-SP1 number was somewhere around thirty-two, so it is a pretty big improvement.
The generic scan tool for patches MBSA doesn't handle was talked about briefly. It encompasses the MS04-028 and the February patches. It will dump the inventory in as normal patch status like the individual tools, but we will only need to maintain one scan tool instead of scripting a new one every month. Releases will be coordinated with the general patch release. One other note in that portion was that the SMS, SUS, and MBSA teams will need to sign off on a patch before it ships to ensure that it can be detected for Enterprise customers. Very cool!
They talked at length about Vintela, but I'm saving it for another post. I'm very excited about their product!
The Dell update scan tool was also mentioned at length, but the most interesting thing for me was the announcement that Microsoft is working with HP to develop a similar tool. It should be out in the December/January time frame, but is subject to change as always. It should detect the same things the Dell scan tool does, including drivers, firmware, bios updates, and application updates.
The scan tool for Microsoft Update will be available 30 days after the product ships, so probably in June. This will give SMS access to the single catalog that we've all been looking forward to.
The Brothers Anderson also talked about System Center Reporting Manager. As mentioned in Ed's notes, it looks very good. I have some concerns about the migration path for all of our SMS 2003 reports that we've authored, but the technology is good. It is all based on SQL Reporting Services, which my manager would be happy to hear.
My notes about SMS v4 will be in the post that follows.