Other Improvements in Operations Manager 2007

Although the MP changes are the most significant, many other changes in OM 2007 deserve attention from prospective customers or partners.

Client Monitoring

As with MOM 2005, OM 2007 comes with MPs for monitoring the basic functions of Microsoft desktop OSs (XP and Vista) but also includes new MPs for monitoring Internet Explorer, Media Player, and Office applications as well. However, the IT overhead imposed by in-depth health monitoring of clients is palpable, and is easiest to justify for business-critical desktops, such as financial trading workstations, and for devices used by many people throughout the day-such as Internet kiosks, casino gaming machines, airport ticketing machines, and ATMs-where there is no assigned user to diagnose problems or bring problems to the attention of IT.

A new type of client-side monitoring introduced with OM 2007, called Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM), is intended for much broader use across large numbers of Windows PCs assigned to ordinary users.