News
The New Microsoft Management Roadmap
Update from Microsoft Management Summit in March.
- By Scott Bekker
- 05/10/2004
Lately more and more of Microsoft's planned product releases have been
sliding from 2004 into 2005 or even off the edge of the map into 2006
or 2007 [Yukon, Visual Studio, Longhorn]. But for its stable of management
products, Microsoft claims to still be on schedule to deliver a lot of
code in 2004—at least that's what the company is saying for now.
And, Microsoft officials say, don't worry about all the name changes
like the renaming of the next release of Microsoft Operations Manager
from MOM 2004 to MOM 2005. The product names have to do with Microsoft's
fiscal year, and fiscal 2005 starts this summer. Never mind that it's
inconsistent with the release of Systems Management Server 2003 in Microsoft's
fiscal year 2004. Anyway, here's the roadmap that emerged out of the Microsoft
Management Summit in March:
- MOM 2005, the management tool for monitoring IT operations,
entered its third and final beta phase in March. Microsoft expects it
to ship later this year, along with a new stripped-down version, called
MOM Express, for smaller organizations.
- SMS 2003 Feature Packs are also on the way in 2004. The Device
Management Feature Pack will extend SMS to mobile devices, laptops and
smartphones. The Operating System Deployment Feature Pack will be designed
for creating and deploying Windows OS images and for upgrading systems
in place with rich status reporting.
- System Center 2005 is a planned suite of Microsoft's two flagship
management products—SMS and MOM. Microsoft says this one is coming in
2004, too, but it's dependent on some pretty clean execution. Because
Microsoft plans to ship System Center 2005 with the SMS 2003 Service
Pack 1 version as well as the SMS feature packs and MOM 2005, all those
components must be on time for this one to make it in 2004.
- Windows Update Services, the new name for Software Update Services
2.0 (see related story), will enter broad beta testing in the summer
and ship in the second half.
[This article originally appeared on ENTmag.com in March; for an update
on Longhorn, see "Allchin
Updates Windows Server Roadmap at WinHEC" on the ENTmag.com site.—Editor.]
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.