Thursday, April 27, 2006 1:54 PM
jhinkle
MMS 2006: Introduction and Drilldown into System Center Reporting Manager
This session was presented by Emma Archer and Tony DeAmicis.
System Center Reporting Manager is one of the products I wanted to learn more about here at MMS. There were a few key things I was unaware of. The first, and probably most important, is that it is more of a data warehousing application. All of the data from AD, MOM, and SMS gets pulled in for reporting purposes. The transfers from SMS happen on a schedule and is performed by a service that is installed on the site server.
From what I'm seeing, most of the reports are focused on MOM. All of the current reports that are in MOM have been ported to SCRM. There is a much smaller set of SMS reports. There is support for extended SMS_DEF.MOF data, but it seems to be a manual process. There is a table that can be extended.
The next version will utilize the report builder from SQL 2005.
It is very disconcerting when the recommendation is that we don't try to extend this product because there will be significant improvements in extensibility in v2. It makes me feel like the product was rushed to market and usability was not the primary concern. I realize that there are always limitations on what gets included in the v1 product, but when there is a complete re-write between v1 and v2, there clearly wasn't enough thought put into the features that are needed by the users of the product. I'm sure it will be better when we get to the common database schema for MOM and SMS, but right now I'm hearing "don't bother because the next version will actually be useful".
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