Two New Management Products Coming

Two new management products are targeted for release in the second half of 2007: a trouble ticketing, asset management, and change-management product (code-named Service Desk), and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (code-named Carmine), a product for managing virtualization capabilities being built into the next release of Windows Server. Both products were announced at the Apr. 2006 Microsoft Management Summit (MMS), and although details are scant and neither product has gone into beta testing yet, they promise to fill critical gaps in Microsoft’s portfolio of management technologies.

Service Desk

IT departments have long desired a “closed loop” systems-management solution in which monitoring software automatically detects a problem and generates an alert containing the probable cause. The alert then generates a trouble ticket linked to the specific hardware or software assets involved, which in turn initiates a software-enforced human workflow to resolve the issue. When a change is made to correct the problem (either manually or using automated tools), the management system updates the change control and asset databases to record what changed (including when and by whom) and automatically closes the associated ticket.