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Microsoft System Center Essentials

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Features

Learn about the features and benefits of Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007.

Unified Experience

Feature

New or updated in SP1

Description

Unified reporting

Unified reporting, based on the SQL 2005 reporting engine, is provided to help you easily run, review, save, print, or email information about the status of your IT environment. Essentials 2007 provides you with more than 30 preconfigured reports upon installation to cover your reporting needs. These reports cover things like: asset inventory, status of your IT environment, capacity planning, software deployment, and update compliance. You can even configure Essentials 2007 to email a comprehensive daily status report first thing in the morning.

Expert knowledge

yes

With Essentials 2007, you get a breadth of expert knowledge for managing your important platforms, applications, and workloads. This knowledge includes support and diagnostic information for things like Windows Server and client operating systems, Active Directory, Office, Exchange, SQL, and IIS. For Service Pack 1, all the management packs have been tuned and enhanced.

Overview pages

yes

The unified console provides single screen overview pages with summary information; common tasks, alerts, and reports, allowing you to quickly check the status of your IT environment. From these pages, you can quickly drill down to get information to fix any IT issues you might see. Logically organized “spaces” or panes have been created for each management area like Computers, Monitoring, and Updates. You can also customize the views to suit your needs. Diagram views of your IT environment are also provided, from which you can drill down to perform tasks or get more detailed information. Service Pack 1 incorporates several enhancements in terms of speed, layout, and usability of the console.

Central distribution of updates and software

Using the same central console from which you monitor your IT environment, you can assess, configure, and distribute updates, plus install software to groups and computers you want to target.

Proactive Management

Feature

New or updated in SP1

Description

Integrated troubleshooting

yes

Essentials 2007 enables you to receive notification of any problems and troubleshoot more efficiently and effectively by offering integrated problem resolution for clients, servers, and services like Exchange Server. With Essentials 2007, you get:

  • Support and diagnostic information for Windows Server and client operating systems, Active Directory, Office, Exchange, SQL, IIS, DPM, and CRM 3.0

  • Definitive information right in the console that will help you prevent and solve problems with your IT resources

  • In-line links to click and “fix it now”

  • Remote control support for managed client and server computers

  • Notification of problems via email, pager, or SMS text message

Self-managing

Essentials 2007 is a self-managing solution that can alert you to performance problems or when updates are required for your IT environment. Essentials 2007 automatically checks for new updates available and applicable to your IT environment and provides notification and access reports on update deployment progress to help you quickly troubleshoot any update deployment issues.

Secure and up to date

Upon installation, Essentials 2007 allows you to immediately assess, configure, and patch your IT environment without interrupting your users or network service. The provided configuration wizard allows you to easily set the update behavior for clients and servers on your network. You can define update parameters such as which products to patch and types of updates to push out, or simply install immediately “on demand.” Essentials 2007 also supports automatic deployment of updates for Microsoft operating systems, hardware updates, drivers, and software applications—both Microsoft and non-Microsoft. Support for a shared update schema also allows you to import catalogs from non-Microsoft update providers. Because Essentials 2007 checks for new updates applicable to your environment, and provides notification, you can make appropriate and timely update decisions.

Asset visibility and inventory

Essentials 2007 automates the collection of software and hardware inventory so you can review assets for optimum configuration and compliance. You can perform searches, filter, and run reports on your inventory to generate updated lists of all installed software applications and hardware inventory attributes for compliance and inventory reports.

Increased Efficiency

Feature

New or updated in SP1

Description

Easy update configuration

The provided update configuration wizard allows you to easily set the update behavior for clients and servers on your network. You can define update parameters such as which products to patch and types of updates to push out, or simply install immediately “on demand.” Using the wizard, you can quickly and correctly set the initial update configuration for your IT environment. Once updates are configured, you can manually or automatically deploy updates for Microsoft operating systems, hardware updates, third-party updates, drivers, and Microsoft and non-Microsoft software applications to ensure the security of your IT environment. Service Pack 1 adds the ability to customize different approval settings by update groups and a much improved 3rd party update import wizard.

Simple software deployment

A simple wizard quickly walks you through the process of deploying software by creating a package and targeting installation on clients and servers in your network. You can deploy MSI and non-MSI applications, drivers, Microsoft and non-Microsoft QFEs. You can accurately target your software installations by grouping computers and defining command line configurations. You don’t have to snapshot an install image on a separate computer or enter command line syntax to designate a silent install. Using the wizard, you can simply browse to an .msi or .exe package, walk through a three-step process, and deploy it to clients and servers in your IT environment. The wizard takes care of the complex parts of the process while allowing you to specify where the software is installed, set an install deadline, track installation progress, or troubleshoot the installation.

Quick product install and configuration

Using a simple installation wizard, you can get up and running in less than an hour. There is no need to worry about configuring group policy, installing databases, or setting security. If you’re currently using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 2.0 or 3.0, you can upgrade to Essentials 2007 during setup. This upgrade will preserve existing update information. If you currently have MOM 2005, or MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition installed in your IT environment, you can easily migrate to Essentials 2007. You can also choose to establish side-by-side operation with Essentials 2007 to preserve mission critical data. With Service Pack 1, the setup process has been improved to handle a variety of environments, including Windows Server 2008 and new tools for disaster recovery have been added. The overall memory footprint for the Essentials server has been reduced by 70%, for a more efficient and smooth operation on your existing infrastructure.

Automatic discovery of computers and devices

The Computer and Device Management Wizard quickly walks you through the process of selecting the computers and devices to be managed in your IT environment. As new clients or other machines come on-line, for example, a new laptop joining your domain, you can select to have Essentials 2007 start managing it right away. With Service Pack 1, Essentials can discover and monitor both SNMP v1 and v2 devices.

Customized monitoring

You can add monitoring without being an expert by using provided templates. For example, using the provided wizard you can create monitoring for your website, a database, or file share. You can also custom configure monitoring to suit the organization of your IT environment by business unit, location, and/or job function.