Service Manager Beta One
So, after a couple of weeks with the service manager beta, I have a few thoughts to share about the product, it's install, and perhaps a couple of catches.
First of all I can't recommend strongly enough that you read the documentation (srvcmgrQuickStart.doc) completely. Twice. Maybe even three times. While the installation experience is much improved from prior versions, there are still minor things that you could skip that would doom the installation.
I suggest creating a new security group in which you'll put all of the users that you want to be administrators of Server Manager. Only these users will be able to run the console, whether installing it on their local machine or attempting to run it from the service manager server. The account you specify as the service account must also be in this group.
While the active directory connector is functioning, the recommendation is to not import more than 50 users.
Should you have to uninstall Service Manager, first uninstall from the Control Panel, then remove the reports from http://<localserver>/reports, then run the "'stsadm -o uninstallfeature -force -name" that are listed in the docs. Then you'll have to go into SQL Manager and delete the databases that were created on install. THEN you can re-install the product successfully, assuming you fix the reason you had to re-install in the first place.
More as we begin to put it through it's paces.