We will be meeting at the offices of the Ohio State Department of Administrative Services. Directions can be found here <http://www.das.ohio.gov/gsd/directions.htm>

The November 2nd OSUG meeting has been cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.  The next meeting will be held on Feb. 1st, 2007.

 Warren Byle, OSUG Chairman

You are invited the Summer quarterly meeting of the Ohio SMS Users Group on August 3rd at Grange Insurance Headquarters in Columbus!!

Coffee and pastries will be available at 9:30am and the meeting will start at 10am.

Lunch is provided and we will have prizes to give away!!

So don't miss it!!

RSVP to bylew@grangeinsurance.com if you plan on attending.

See you there! 

Warren Byle

OSUG Chairman

From the microsoft.public.sms.admin newsgroup:

This year at the Microsoft Management Summit 2006 in San Diego, CA, the SMS Documentation Team is presenting a Birds of a Feather session called "Discuss Innovations in SMS Documentation". This session (session number BF01) will be held at the convention center on Tuesday 4/25, from 5:30 - 6:45. At this session we plan to demonstrate the new hot fixing process we developed with the SMS product team for updating the SMS help file without having to wait for a service pack, demonstrate and solicit feedback about the Help On The Box (HOTB) and Help On The Web (HOTW) concepts for delivering content, as well as the new TechCenter concept, and solicit feedback about other outstanding questions we have concerning content including content organization, alternate delivery mechanisms (such as hosting the entire content set on an SMS site), and web-based video How To topics. Last year the Birds of a Feather session we hosted helped us to formulate the direction we've taken with the SMS v4 HOTB and HOTW content sets, and this year we'd like to "prove" that idea and make any course corrections we need to make early on in the process. We highly value our customers' input and expect this session to be just as beneficial to us and the product team. Please join us for this discussion!

~Steve Kaczmarek
Techncial Writing Lead
Windows Enterprise Management Division - UA

Follow this link for a nice grid of detection and deployment guidance for April 2006 Security patches:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917767

Greg

This is a Free half-day seminar.

Coming soon to Austin, Houston, Minneapolis, Washington DC, and Columbus Ohio.

http://www.wise.com/apbp_seminars.asp

Description of the Vintela VMX Presentation for Feb 1

Most organizations contain a combination of Windows-based and Unix-based resources. Traditionally, providing Enterprise-wide management to both resource types tends to be problematic; SMS provides Superior Windows resources management, but cannot provide the same management to the Unix resources in the organization.

Therefore, in a mixed-platform environment administrators rely on administration tools separate from SMS for all non-Windows platform management, even though the administration tasks are essentially the same regardless of platform. 

To solve this problem, Vintela has developed Vintela Management Extensions, or VMX. VMX seamlessly extends SMS management support to non-Windows resources, enabling SMS to become the central platform for managing all computer resources in an enterprise – Windows and non-Windows alike.

Currently Vintela is developing VMX support for these non-Windows platforms:

• AIX
• HP-UX
• Linux
• Solaris
• Mac OS X

VMX solves the multi-platform administration and management nightmare by seamlessly integrating with SMS to extend SMS management and administration to non-Windows platforms. IT personnel do not have to learn a new management paradigm; they simply use SMS to manage non-Windows resources. This saves your organization time and money.

 Come and see how with the power of Vintela Management Extensions from Quest Software we extend the capabilities of Microsoft SMS!

Deb Hocker

Michael Kleef posted a bit of information today about the next version of SMS (commonly referred to as “SMS v4”).  Take a look at some of the improvements for the next version of SMS.  Can you say “Drag and Drop”?  :)

http://blogs.technet.com/mkleef/archive/2006/01/13/417347.aspx

Michael also mentions the SMS 2003 Desired Configuration Monitoring tool. Here's the brief description:

Define desired configuration models and enable SMS 2003 to proactively monitor configuration settings for compliance. Administrators can create and edit XML models through an authoring GUI to define desired configuration values and check for configuration compliance such as registry settings, files, software updates, and service packs.

And don't forget, if you're in or near Ohio, don't miss our next Ohio SMS Users Group meeting. Dustin Ingalls is our keynote, and we have some great vendors coming in during the afternoon also!

Greg

This is the meeting you don't want to miss!

Our keynote speaker will be Dustin Ingalls, SMS Product Unit Manger from Microsoft! He's coming to Columbus Ohio all the way from Redmond to give us more information about the next version of SMS ("version 4"), and upcoming cool stuff with SMS 2003. In addition to all the great information he's going to give us, he also wants feedback from you. He wants your feedback on SMS 2003, and what you think of the presented improvements for SMS version 4. We can't stress this enough-This is your opportunity to give face-to-face feedback to the Manager of Microsoft Systems Management Server!

The Winter Quarterly meeting is just 4 weeks away! It will be held on Wednesday (yes, Wednesday this time), February 1st at Grange Insurance Headquarters in Columbus, Ohio from 9:30 am - 4:00 pm. Same great discussions, presentations, and interaction as always!! (and once again don't forget the great food!!)

Here is a preview of our agenda:

9:30-9:50 - Registration and Coffee Social
9:55-10:00 - Welcome
10:00-11:00 - Keynote - Dustin Ingalls from Microsoft
11:00-11:10 - Break
11:10-12:10 - Keynote - Dustin Ingalls from Microsoft Q & A
1210-1:10 - Lunch
1:10 - 1:45 - OSUG Karaoke
1:45-2:45 - Session 3 -- Application Packaging with SMS 2003 using InstallShield Admin Studio
2:45-3:00 - Break
3:00-4:00 - Session 4 -- Vintela Presentation & Demo

This would be a great meeting to introduce your managers to the Ohio SMS Users Group. Just tell them about our keynote, the free coffee & bagels, and then about the lunches that Chef Eric puts together for us - yep, that should do it!

All that on top of great discussions, food and prizes!
Registration, food and parking are free!

Register here: http://ramsey.usanethosting.com/OSUG/register/

Driving Directions and Parking Information: http://myitforum.com/blog/osug/archive/2006/01/18/18441.aspx

Keep an eye on the OSUG blog for more information: http://www.myitforum.com/blog/osug

Warren and Greg
OSUG Co-Chairmen

Questions? osug@columbus.rr.com

Do you have patched Administrative Installation Points for Office Products? If so, don't uninstal the Microsoft Office Inventory Tool for Updates just yet.

Rod posted a reference yesterday to KB 903773:

No Microsoft Office updates are displayed when you use Microsoft Update or Windows Server Update Services

Basically, for all Office Products installed from a patched admin install point, you will not be able to use the ITMU to detect and deploy patches to that product. "Patched admin install point" means an admin install point that you have updated (e.g. with a service pack or hotfix using a .msp file).

From the KB article:
This behavior occurs if a client computer uses an updated Office administrative installation point as the installation source. Updates can only be correctly detected by Microsoft Update or by WSUS if the updated were applied directly to a client computer and not to an administrative installation point.

Microsoft Update or WSUS can be used to update a client computer only if the installation source has not been updated.

The workaround for this issue is to:
1) Revert the updated admin install point to an unaltered installation source, or
2) Continue to detect and deploy updates to Office using the Microsoft Office Inventory Tool for Updates

Note: The KB mentioned above doesn't reference Visio, Front Page, or Project, but I would imagine the same applies for them. I've submitted and email and awaiting a response from MS. I'll update this article when I receive clarification.

Greg

At our November meeting, Derek Hartung from 1E gave us a brief overview of the SMS Alliance during his presentation.

You can get more information about the SMS Alliance at their web site (www.sms-alliance.com). They also have a nice powerpoint presentation from the recent SMS Alliance Roadshow that gives additional detail about each member of the SMS Alliance.  Also from their home page, check out the Free Knowledge link for more presentations.

Greg