Microsoft’s Other Management Products

In addition to Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Microsoft sells two other server products targeted at the management space-Systems Management Server 2.0 (SMS) and Application Center 2000 (AppCenter). Each has a unique management role, but both have functions that overlap with MOM, and integration between them is practically nonexistent.

SMS Targets Change and Configuration Management

SMS allows organizations to electronically inventory their PCs and Windows servers, deploy software to those machines, make configuration changes across groups of machines, remotely manage machines, and manage software license use across their networks. Microsoft classifies this role as “change and configuration management,” although there are other change management tasks that SMS does not perform, such as logging configuration changes made manually to servers or workstations.

SMS 2.0 comes bundled with a monitoring tool named HealthMon that performs a subset of MOM’s functions, but that will be retired in favor of MOM in the future. However, since HealthMon was built purely on the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) model, Microsoft intends to improve MOM’s agent by implementing some of HealthMon’s WMI support into a future version.