New Management Pack for System Center Essentials 2007 RTMs.

For anyone who uses Sytem Center Essentials 2007 to monitor network devices a MAJOR announcement was made this week. Jalasoft announced that Xian Network Manager for System Center Essentials has RTMed. Most people who use SCE or SCOM know about Jalasoft’s products. Jalasoft has had Xian Network Manager for SCOM for some time now, which is considered by most to be the best device monitor on the market for SCOM. Unfortunately, Xian for SCOM was not compatible with SCE. this announcement means that those of us running SCE in our environments can now do very granular monitoring of our network hardware as well as our Microsoft environment.

For further information including Jalasoft’s Press Release please click here:

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/presscentre/teched07/partner.mspx

 

The trial version download of Xian for SCE can be downloaded here:

http://www.jalasoft.com/Web/Product/Product.aspx?id=47

New OCS 2007 installation

I just completed a new Office Communications Server 2007 installation at work last week and I have to say “Awesome product!”.

After using OCS for a little under a week I have to admit that I can see my desk phone going the way of the dinosaur and Dodo bird. It was a very simple and straight forward install. The one caveat is that you have to pay close attention to the policies that are created on the OCS server after the installation is complete. It took me a bit of hunting around to figure out that the default policy for OCS out of the box has Live Meeting disabled for your clients. Once finding the default policy and updating it we were creating on the fly meetings from Outlook and Office Communicator regularly.

I can see that there is a subset of people who will have a hard time adapting to the new paradigm that OCS brings to the workplace, as I am already having users ask me how to use their phone with OCS meetings, not understanding that when using the audio and video capabilities of your computer there really is no need for using your phone when communicating within our company.

I also must admit that our OCS installation does not connect to our phone system at this time. This is due to limitations of our already in place VOIP system which happens to not be SIP compliant, once that piece is in place, then there truly will be no need for a phone on my desk and I think some people are scared by that idea. Personally, I just want more desktop available to work on.