MMS Day Three : Keynote
Managing The Dynamic Desktop
Microsoft Funny Guy: Still not so much.
User - Centric Computing : Delivering an application to a user in a seamless fashion regardless of the device they use to connect. The user is the device. Deliver an app either virtualized, hosted, or 'standard' depending on bandwidth and device. Give the user the opportunity to be productive across all of their devices.
Key components in the delivery of this vision are cached and offline folders, application virtualization (Softgrid), and SCCM.
A brief demo of a consistent desktop across a laptop and remote terminal services session was impressive. With Windows Terminal Services 2008 they were able to replicate the user's laptop experience, down to the wallpaper. They then demonstrated the same thing using Citrix and then Xen Virtualization, where the Vista session was running virtually. Pretty cool.
Announcement : Config Manager SP1 Available in May. R2 Release Candidate Available in July. SP1 / R2 incorporates Intel VPro functionality and new Asset Matrix capability, with auto update capability.
New version of MDOP available Q3.
There's been a lot of talk here about separating the application from the OS and App Virtualization. I thought last year that we would see the day when Microsoft and other vendors begin delivering thier apps MDOP ready, and I think we're continuing to move closer to that today.
Using the Intel VPro add on to Config Mgr, they remotely powered off machines in the Comm-net lab, which was cool. And funny. The machines powered off within about three seconds, and they could multi-select machines. This makes WOL look like a dinosaur. Then using Out-Of-Band management they were able to remote boot a machine, watch it boot, and change BIOS settings. You can also force an IDE redirection and remote boot a PC off of a network file or image in the case of severe OS failure. This would allow you to do disk level diagnostics and copy client data.
Bill Anderson did a demo of Network Access Protection. The key thing for me was a demo of having the ability to provide NAP protection in the event of a Line-Of-Business app being out of date. It's just a couple of clicks on the deployment of any SCCM app. So you don't have to worry about users coming in and munging that critical database because their client app is two versions out of date. They won't get access until it's upgraded.
Technology Preview!
A demo of an add-on that pulls Config Manager and Ops Manager data and runs business analytics against it. It consolidates it into scorecards that enable stakeholders to view metrixs and make business decisions. It can also allow you to compare metrics and baselines to other companies that have also used the service. It surfaces data metrics from other companies without revealing anything about that company. It also includes notification services, where Microsoft and other customers can surface issues and allow them to trickle down to you based on hardware and configurations. Very promising functionality.
Summary:
I've long held that the Management space is the place to be in IT. Exciting things are happening and will continue to happen. We deliver value and savings to our clients / offices today, and will continue to drive down costs while driving up functionality. I'm totally geeked to be in this space today, thank my company for sending me to MMS, and thank Microsoft for finally leading in this space. A MS TA once told me that Microsoft first enters the space, then gets it right, then innovates. Well in the management space Microsoft is innovating like no one else.