Scott Moss at myITforum.com

The Atlanta Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for June 26th, 2009 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking.

Registration Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032417796&IO=uUah7g34dDfimqriNH71Jg%3d%3d

DATE & TIME

June 26th, 2009
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Lunch provided courtesy of Dell! Thanks Randy!

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHIES

Denny Ramsey

Denny is a Datacenter Technology Specialist at Microsoft who focuses on working with enterprise customers in the southeast geography. Denny has been with Microsoft for 4 years and has spent the bulk of his time focused on core infrastructure and collaboration technologies. Most recently, Denny has focused on Datacenter Virtualization technologies including Server, Desktop and Presentation virtualization as well as remote connectivity into these systems. Before joining Microsoft, Denny spent 7 years at a large MSO where he filled several roles including Enterprise Architect and Windows Core Infrastructure manager.

Phillip Gibson

Phillip Gibson is a senior consultant with Microsoft working in the Communications Sector for North America. Phillip has over 10 years of experience in professional services specializing in systems management, monitoring operations, and system deployment. Certified in Microsoft’s entire System Center product suite, Phillip has lead and/or participated in numerous System Center projects engagements implementing some of the most complex and advanced features.

Brian Huneycutt

Brian is currently a developer (more a jack-of-all-trades really) on the Configuration Manager Sustained Engineering team. He started as a Support Engineer handling consumer desktop support issues at Microsoft in 1999. After having his fill of "No, there is no double right click, just a double left click" and "I'm sorry sir, I cannot help you with your ISP's login password issue" he escaped transitioned to the SMS team, where he quickly learned the value of the SMS logs. Once firmly entrenched in the SMS world, he worked through all levels of support, ending up as an Escalation Engineer ("What do you want to debug today?") prior to moving to the product team. These days he still partners with CSS (current acronym for Support) on problem investigations, along with development work on hotfixes, service packs, and generally anything that needs either fixing or a very long email. Those fleeting moments of free time are split between family, tooling around town in a little Triumph Spitfire, or making sawdust in the garage / workshop.

Greg Cameron

Greg Cameron is a Senior Technology Specialist with Microsoft working in the Communications Sector. He has been with Microsoft for over 6 years and has been involved with technical sales of Virtualization, Server Operating System and Management solutions. Greg has been in the Technology industry for 10 years, working at a Fortune 10 company working with Server Operations/Architecture Management and Technical Sales/Consulting consulting. Prior to entering the Technology industry he served as an Officer in the United States Navy and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He currently lives in Atlanta,GA.

Thank you for your continued Support!

Scott Moss
President - System Center Virtual Users Group
Vice President - Southeast Management Users Group

Another update for the OpsMgr team, the old news group forums have moved to Technet Forums!

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/systemcenteroperationsmanager

Some tools that have been released recently that should be checked out.

Notification Test Tool

I've been waiting for this on, look forward to playing with it in the lab.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/05/19/notifications-test-tool.aspx

Notifications Update Alert History Tool
This tool was previewed at MMS 2008, but was not released till last month. It does not test command channel, which is the only improvement I could ask for in this tool.

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/05/08/notifications-update-alert-history-tool.aspx

Visio Add-in for Operations Manager 2007 R2 Beta released

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2009/04/24/visio-add-in-for-operations-manager-2007-r2-beta-released.aspx

Video about the Visio Add-in

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Visio-Integration-with-Operations-Manager-R2/

Brian Wren's Store Application Management Pack

Brian Wren has been busy with the Sample Application MP. Recent updates are, Sample Application For SP1, Powershell scripts
in the Sample Application MP.

http://blogs.technet.com/brianwren/default.aspx

Original Store Application Sample MP and Document are available here

http://www.opsmanjam.com/Lists/OpsManJam%20Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=13

Is available for download at this url.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=e9f3cd3f-9bc0-45cd-b10f-120e937ee4c4

This management pack is only supported on the R2 platform.

Brief Description
This Management Pack includes an extensive set of monitoring including synthetic transactions to effectively monitor Exchange 2007 and report on performance, availability, and reliability of its server roles.

Quick Details
File Name: Exchange Server 2007 Operations Manager 2007 R2 MP.msi
Version: 6.0.6623.0
Date Published: 6/12/2009
Language: English
Download Size: 18 KB - 3.2 MB*

Some of the features, have been a long time coming for the exchange management pack, I'm looking forward to seeing them in action. Synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, a significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled (standing ovation), full support for Microsoft clustered configurations (read MP guide for more details).

Feature Summary

A number of synthetic transactions ensure the Exchange servers are available and responding in a timely manner. The synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, so that if the target of a transaction is in maintenance mode, the source will not run the transaction, and not alert unnecessarily.
This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Services, POP3, and IMAP.
This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring mail flow synthetic transactions between agent-managed Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers.
This Management Pack provides 30+ reports specific to Exchange 2007 that track availability and performance compared to service level objectives. For the list of reports and for more information about the reports, see the Management Pack Guide.
All the synthetic transactions in this Management Pack use an Operations Manager 2007 R2 hosting feature for Windows PowerShell technology that provides a performance improvement when running synthetic transactions.
A significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled. Note that many of these rules are still in the Management Pack so that you can enable them if necessary.
Support for monitoring any number of Exchange organizations using a single Operations Manager 2007 management group.
Full support for Microsoft clustered configurations. For more details, see the Management Pack Guide.
Discovery of Exchange 2007 server roles is disabled by default, and no Exchange 2007 monitoring is applied by default. This allows you to discover and monitor your servers gradually, as well as tune the Management Pack as you bring more agent-managed Exchange 2007 servers into the Operations Manager environment.

During a recent IIS 7 MP tune up, I noticed in MP Viewer 1.7 was only showing 6 discoveries with time frequencies, which seemed odd because I had just made overrides for more than 20 Object Discoveries.

The object discoveries have two time tags in XML, one which shows the frequency in seconds <IntervalSeconds>, the second XML tag that MP Viewer does not show the frequency is <PeriodInSeconds>. MP Studio Lite, from Silect Software has the same problem. This must be a new feature. ;)

The Atlanta Southeast Management User Group invites you to attend the next SMUG meeting scheduled for June 26th, 2009 for a day of great presentations, discussions, and networking.

We are putting out an incomplete Agenda early to allow time for folks to plan to make it to the meeting. I'll post schedule updates as needed.

Registration Link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032417796&IO=uUah7g34dDfimqriNH71Jg%3d%3d

DATE & TIME

June 26th, 2009
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Lunch provided courtesy of Dell! Thanks Randy!

We look forward to seeing you there!

Scott Moss
President - System Center Virtual Users Group
Vice President - Southeast Management Users Group