Can you imagine the press’ reaction to this (not to mention the Tonight Show snafu) if President Bush had done it instead of Obama. The double-standard that is now the status quo in this country is mind-boggling.

Good luck!!!

I love TheOnion.com as a whole. They have some incredibly creative videos and the technology based ones usually hit WAY too close to home.

Plus I really AM worried about the children who turn into mutants during the apocalypse. What if we are teaching them skills today that can be used against us in the future???

I have an answer for that last, most important, question. Give us solutions!

By that I don’t mean tell me that Microsoft can make my life a technological utopia and then give me a whitepaper on possible topologies for Exchange 2007. I mean give me real guidance for real world solutions. Show me how to best combine multiple products to build complete solutions that can help my business become more productive, more efficient and more agile. That is something I can work with. IT Pros who don’t work in management are happy with whitepapers and answers based on singular products as that often fits with their job descriptions, but those who manage IT departments need to know how the whole solution works in order to effectively inform other business units of IT’s production. The ROI of technology has always been a hard number to pin down, so everything that can be done to help IT managers sell our work within the business is a big win.

For more information regarding the new and improved OCS R2 visit the virtual launch site at www.ocsr2launch.com.

This goes back to the development process of Service Manager, a product that has taken years to get out the door (assuming that it does indeed get released sometime in the foreseeable future). It also to a lesser extent deals with the release cycles of SCCM and SCOM which take many months to go through R&D, Q&A, and then multiple revisions of beta releases. After these large scale products are finally released to the public, System Center Essentials (Microsoft’s management product for small and mid-sized businesses, SMB) is finally updated based on the success of failures of the larger products.

Why not update SCE first? It is a much smaller product which should be considerably easier to change/update/improve with a much more agile user base, thereby leading to a faster change and beta testing period. Microsoft could then update their larger products (SCCM/SCOM) based on the success and failure of SCE’s changes. Theoretically this should shorten the upgrade curve on the larger products as they would be starting higher up the learning curve than they do when starting from scratch. This should also lead to a more appropriately capable and scaled product for every size customer, since the product begins by being built for a small customer (no longer are large products being hacked and chopped so that they can be shoe-horned into a smaller organization) and new and different abilities can be added as appropriate as the product grows while moving up in environment size.

It is my opinion that Microsoft needs to stop overlooking their SMB customers, and start building not just products, but entire solutions, for these users. If they start in this space and then grow their products as the need arises I believe that they could shrink their development windows and increase their product capabilities and stability as products would grow in maturity as they grow in scale and capability.

What are your thoughts?

Tim

I have been working with System Center Service Manager (Microsoft’s foray into the service desk arena), in some form or another, since it’s original announcement and beta release going on 2 years ago. Therefore, I am very excited that Service Manager is looking like it should see a release sometime in 2009 or 2010. And while I have found the latest iteration of Service Manager to be an excellent product (you can get info about downloading the latest beta of SM here: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/service-manager.aspx), what I really want to get into today is not SM’s capabilities (these may change over the next 12 or so months at least a little, plus most of it is still under NDA anyway) but the basic underlying architecture that Microsoft has chosen. Service Manager is built using the System Center Configuration Manager database. At first glance this may seem to be a good thing, Microsoft has found a way to consolidate databases making it possible to run 2 products SCSM and SCCM using only 1 database. But…The old (and new) version of Forefront, Microsoft’s anti-malware product, is built on the Operations Manager database. And again I hear you say “Great! Now I can run 4 products with only 2 databases.” And once I again I say, “But wait there’s more.” We still need WSUS to complete the management puzzle. So now we can manage our entire network using Microsoft’s System Center suite of products using (by my count) 5 products and a bare minimum of 6 servers, some of which may be virtualized against Microsoft’s recommendations. Awesome! Except I’m a mid-sized business so I use Systems Center Essentials…

Oops!

So what are we Mid-Biz’s to do? As of right now I am sorry to say that I cannot find a way to put all the pieces together so that they fit. Obviously, for a mid-biz 6 servers just for management is not a realistic solution and that’s not even mentioning the overkill that SCCM and SCOM would be for someone with under 500 clients on their network. As I covered back in September, making SCE and Forefront work together is very possible, but trying to add Service Manager to the mix just does not work well right now.

The first thing we learned the hard way, is that you have to have your dial plans set up perfectly before attempting to complete this integration. I’m not too proud to admit that we were not in a perfect position prior to our attempt at UC. This was not due to a lack of effort, but was in fact due to to amount of complexity that comes from being in a 918 area code as well as dialing 9 to get an outside number, start adding in 911 and a few other factors and you can start to see why our route plans were large and unwieldy from the start. This can cause issues because while you can normalize your outbound numbers with OCS when making a call, you cannot do the same on inbound calls so call ID becomes a real headache.

Some of these issues were mitigated at least to some extent not too long after we did our integration when Microsoft released an update for OCS that allows creating a direct trunk from OCS to CUCM without need of an intermediary of some type, but it still remains an issue until (hopefully) the next release of Call Manager includes support for call forking.

Call forking brings up the other part of why I say it works “kinda”. Until call forking is supported by the VOIP system, all Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) can really do is act as an extension of your hand touching your phone. You can use MOC to take your phone off the hook and place a call, but the call still goes by way of the phone, not via MOC. Once Cisco supports call forking, then MOC can truly be an extension of your VOIP system so that you can place and receive calls from your PC. THAT is when I will be able to truly answer “Yes” the the UC question.