I recently rediscovered my old SMS trainer through LinkedIn. Michael Head was a SMS trainer extraordinaire and has been a MCT since 1993. He now teaches Configuration Manager 2007 as well.

If you are in the Chicago or Dallas areas and want to get up to speed on ConfigMgr 2007, check him out at www.HeadSmartGroup.com. Michael will be teaching near Chicago the week of November 10th and plans the same class in Dallas late November or early December. 

Back by popular demand: Silect Software's “Ten Steps for Upgrading to Operations Manager 2007 Without Alert Storms”

Silect Software has asked me to pass on the following information:

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Computerworld (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115187) reports that the tactic used to access Sarah Palin's email account last week can work work with any account that requires knowing the username and guessing the answer to a single security question. This includes Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and many others.

All you need to know is a mother's maiden name, name of a pet, name of high school, or a tidbit of information that is relatively personal but not impossible to find out.

Should you be concerned? I mentioned in a previous post (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/31783) that one of my websites had been hacked. That one didn't have a personal question (or email address) that was easy to guess, but it is definitely disconcerting to discover someone has gotten into something. So try to use personal questions that are harder to discover the answers for!

The other day, I tried to access the main page of a website that I maintain. I got a blank page. That was just a bit disconcerting.

I refreshed my cache, no improvement. However, I briefly saw a reference to another website on the status line while the blank page was coming up. Concerned the site had been spoofed, I contacted the service provider.

After some investigation, and testing on multiple systems, we determined the page displayed just swell in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer (versions 6 or 7)!  It turned out that there had been an unauthorized insertion of code on the main page. After removing the code, the page displayed properly.

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I still get a chuckle out of the name Windows Mobile Device – isn’t the acronym for that WMD? Sometimes I think my mobile device is closely related to a weapon of mass destruction. Oh that’s right -- after that guffaw, Microsoft renamed the product Microsoft Mobile Device.

Some background here. I had one of the early Compaq Pocket PCs, and bulky as is was, I really liked it. It had 128MB of RAM, I could edit documents and spreadsheets, I could copy and paste, it synchronized with my computer and was much easier to carry around than a laptop … I had my contacts and my entire calendar on it. It was a great PDA.

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A while back, I wrote a post about downtime and managing IT Operations (see http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20187). As a follow-up to that, I just participated in a blog interview with StackSafe about IT Operations and how Operations Manager can help you in managing your downtime (and uptime!). Check it out at http://www.stacksafe.com/blog/kerrie-meyler-a-microsoft-mom-mvp-dishes-about-it-operations/08/19/2008/. 

Systems (and operations) management is a journey, not a destination. What does this mean?

First and foremost, its not something achieved at a point in time. There isn't a big "do it" button (or function key) that magically gets you at systems / operations nirvana.

Not only that, its not a matter of getting there and your job is done, its a continual process. Quality and Productivity is a combination of technology (software you buy), people (the individuals that implement and maintain that software), and the process in place from getting to point A to B to ... Z.

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Stever Rachui, technical reviewer for the upcoming System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Unleashed book, also shines with OpsMgr 2007 support. He recently blogged on which console to use for MP authoring at http://blogs.msdn.com/steverac/archive/2008/06/29/the-authoring-console-or-the-operations-console.aspx. His first comment, similar to my previous blog entries, is that "it depends" (see http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/24208 and http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/20315).

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Actually, "Extending System Center" is a pretty broad title, because that could cover at least an entire chapter in a book (and it does, in System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed!). However, I wanted to mention a new product, Essential Business Server (EBS 2008), available from Microsoft as a Release Candidate beginning May 2008. The EBS product, geared towards the medium-sized market, runs on Windows Server 2008 and uses Essentials in the background. Essentials is part of EBS, but you don't actually see it. This is a very cool example of how Microsoft can use the System Center technology in the background as the management component for other products.  

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When you first install Operations Manager 2007, you may be a bit overwhelmed with all the information that is available to you (if you could figure out what it is and how to find it!), and the fact that you have to forget most of the things you learned if you had MOM 2005. However, there is training available, several books are out - I may be a bit biased, but System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed is the best one available, and there are also numerous utilities and software available for OpsMgr 2007, some of which is at no charge.

Be aware that the software listed in this article is not supported by its author(s) unless otherwise stated.

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Talking about MOF (or ITIL for that matter) isn't the most exciting topic in the world. But I thought it would be interesting to discuss how Microsoft eats their own dogfood, so to speak, in using MOF with its System Center family. Read on ...

Microsoft touts their Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) as a collection of best practices, principles, and models. The MOF provides direction to achieve reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability of mission-critical production systems, focusing on solutions and services using Microsoft products and technologies.

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Introducing a new blog - http://configmgr.spaces.live.com/, started in conjunction with my next book project. Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Unleashed. I have three great coauthors - Byron Holt, Anthony Puca, and Greg Ramsey.

The book is still in its early stages, but we hope to have it hitting the bookshelves (real and virtual) early next year.

If you want to hear what I sound like :), I was recently interviewed by Consortio Services - you can find the podcast discussing the Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed book at http://www.cstechcast.com/home.aspx?Episode=25.

I also spoke with John Fontana of Network World discussing Microsoft's announcements for Operations Manager at MMS 2008, that article is available at http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/051208-microsoft-management-plans.html.

Yes, Las Vegas is generally an interesting place without shows above and beyond its regular fare.

But the 2008 Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) had its own debut - pigs with wings. Now these were not live pigs, but four inches long by three inches high, complete with wings ... and sunglasses. And big smiles on their faces, being hurled by eager Microsofties into a cheering audience.

What was this about? Its often said that when Microsoft announced it was going open source, "pigs would fly" ... okay, you get it. The other saying at MMS this year was "well we tried to freeze this place over, but Las Vegas is too hot."

The hoopla, if you read my article from last week (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27354), had to do with the announced beta release of the Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions (X-Plat), available on CD to conference-goers on April 29th.

While John Fontana (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/042908-microsoft-management-platform.html) saw this as a way for Microsoft to target CA and HP by extending System Center (Operations Manager in particular) to monitor Linux and Unix-based machines, the customers I spoke with saw it a bit differently. If you are using OpsMgr to monitor your Windows enterprise and have something in your organization that's not Windows-based, you have a gap. How do you monitor that web-server running on Linux? What about your financials package running on a flavor of Unix? Sure there is software for that, but its another user interface, another data repository, another type of reports to become familiar with.

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Today at the 2008 Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), Bob Muglia's keynote focused on what Microsoft is calling the "Dynamic Datacenter." What does Microsoft mean by dynamic?

Microsoft has an infrastructure model, also known as the IO model, which can be considered a framework for aligning IT with business needs.The 4th stage of this model is "dynamic," where IT becomes a strategic asset to the organization. The IO model is discussed at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/infrastructure.

A dynamic data center will generally be heterogeneous. Will Microsoft, through System Center, be managing other operating systems? Yes folks, to quote Bob, "it's not your grandfather's Microsoft" (although I don't think Microsoft is as old as my grandfather).

Dynamic datacenters have to be adaptive, which includes the capability to crank out new servers, or apps on any platform, as needed. In a word, we're talking Virtualization, and Bob's talk focuses on new initiatives by Microsoft and System Center in the areas of virtualization and going cross-platform.

Announced today was the beta release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008, which will be able to manage VMWare and ESX, in addition to Microsoft's Virtual Server and Hyper-V (to come out out later this year as an add-on to Windows Server 2008) products. With SCVMM 2008, Microsoft wants to be the single management console for server virtualization, providing a seamless management experience, while exposing each product's unique capabilities.

Bob's second announcement was the Cross Platform Extensions to Operations Manager 2007. What these two announcements mean is that Microsoft, with System Center, is expanding the breadth of its management capabilities to not just manage Microsoft products but Linux, Solaris, AIX, etc.

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I was asked the other day by Network World if I could respond to a reader's request to answer the question:
"If server/switch/router or application x is down, what else will be impacted?"

Good question. With today's distributed computing environment, application dependency mapping is crucial if you want to align IT applications with business processes. You want to be able to know if a database server is down, what applications are going to have problems since they use databases residing on that server. If a part of the network is down, or an application is inaccessible, what does that mean to the rest of the environment?

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Viruses and spyware just got more personal for me.

A friend of mine who's not terribly computer-literate called me late last week. His computer - which was heavily secured with the complete line up of a leading vendor's anti-virus software - had been badly infested by spyware. He took it to a local computer fix-it place who after two weeks gave up and reformatted the hard drive. When he bought the computer he was not given the Windows disks (fairly common among some large computer resellers), so the computer shop put a version of Windows on there that didn't pass the Windows Genuine Advantage test. Now I was being asked to help.

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Articles continue to appear questioning the Windows desktop. 0ne of them by Paul Thurrott in Windows IT Pro (http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98874/does-windows-still-meet-your-needs.html) thinks Gartner is full of hot air.

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April 9, 2008, Gartner Emerging Trends conference - Apparently several Gartner Group analysts (Neil MacDonald and Michael Silver) had more things to say about Vista, and by extension, Windows in general. This included the complexity of the OS, its lack of modularity, and its hardware requirements. When looked at in light of an increasing movement to Web-based and other OS-agnostic applications, that's not good news.

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Now that's an interesting question. Which version are you most enamored with? Let's start by translating the version numbers into names. Windows 5.1 (client version) is Windows XP. Windows 6 client version is Windows Vista. Windows 7 ... well it doesn't exist yet, but it has been in the news this week.

Earlier this week, Bill Gates announced that Windows 7, code name of "Blackcomb" (named for a ski slope at Whistler, British Columbia), would be available sometime in 2009. Now unless you're in love with Vista, that's exciting. (And if you've installed Vista and like it, you may have been annoyed that there could be a new OS by next year.) However, by the next day, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 would not see the light of day prior to 2010.

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