IT Solution Software News and Reviews

eWeek Channel Insider (May 12, 2008) The security sector is thriving, and competition between vendors is fierce—as our results in this group show. Most of the finalists in each category won or lost by a very slim margin. In fact, the voting for top Security Server Software product was the closest of all categories.

Microsoft TechNet (May 9, 2008) Links are now available to all downloads for Microsoft System Center Capacity Planner 2007. You can download the Capacity Planner product and any separately available capacity planning models.

Windows IT Pro (April 29, 2008) Groundbreaking announcements at the Microsoft Management Summit 2008 reveal the company's plans to embrace competition while demonstrating the value proposition of a unified management infrastructure.

eChannelLine Daily News (April 29, 2008) Microsoft Corp. announced technology innovations that are designed to expand the company's virtualization capabilities and introduced its use of open source technologies and industry standards to broaden its ability to deliver automated management of heterogeneous IT environments.

DevX.com (Feb 1, 2008) Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 turns the efficient deployment of servers into a straightforward, automated process, and can also be used to manage configuration changes and system updates.

Enterprise IT Planet.com (Nov 13, 2007) System Center Configuration Manager provides a centralized environment to deploy and provision operating systems and settings, deploy software and application updates, and perform asset inventory and evaluations.

eWeek (April 25, 2007) Microsoft claims it has the tool for deploying Vista: System Center Configuration Manager 2007. eWEEK Labs tests show that its indeed a tool for deploying Vista, but not the only one that should be considered.

Nexus SC: The System Center Team Blog (April 29, 2008) Extending the monitoring capabilities of Operations Manager 2007 to HP-UX, Sun Solaris, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server environments, the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Cross Platform Extensions Beta is available for immediate download. 

InformIT (March 7, 2008) Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 (OpsMgr) is a monitoring and operations management system, implemented using one or more computers that perform their assigned roles as components of a management group.

Computer Business Review (Mar 3, 2008) Syntax Integration, an IT support and outsourcing specialist, has selected Microsoft System Center Operations Manager software for its outsourced IT, infrastructure management and monitoring service, SyntaxOne.

TechTarget.com (April 1, 2008) In two other recent blogs, I took a quick look at the Hyper-V Manager and the simple creation of a virtual machine. Also on SearchServerVirtualization.com, fellow contributor Anil Desai gave advice on using the Hyper-V Manager. Now we’ll take a closer look at System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Tech News World (March 20, 2008) Battling furiously to catch up to market leader VMware in the hypervisor market, Microsoft has unveiled what it calls a "feature-complete" version of its Hyper-V product.

ZDNet.uk (February 28, 2008) Virtual machine management is rapidly becoming a real issue, especially where large numbers of physical and virtual machines are involved. Microsoft's solution is Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (VMM 2007) offering centralised setup, monitoring and management of virtual machines across multiple hosts.

4sysops.com (October 31, 2007) Now that I have taken a closer look at Microsoft’s new management tool for Virtual Server,  I must admit that VMM made me see Virtual Server with different eyes. A good user interface completely changes the perception of a product.

InfoWeek (May 10, 2008) Microsoft touts Data Protection Manager 2007 as an easy, scalable way to enable continuous backup and recovery of Microsoft server apps. This release addresses shortcomings in full restores; continuous backup and restore of Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint; and the ability to back up and restore branch office servers over a WAN.

TechTarget.com (March 11, 2008) Data Protection Manager 2007: Getting dependable backups takes on epic proportions in situations where there are a number of remote offices with servers that need to be backed up. Microsoft took a great step toward helping this situation a year or so ago with the release of Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM).

PC Pro (March 12, 2008) Verdict: System Center Essentials sets out to gather the strands of network system management into one place, and succeeds. Allowing for the licensing costs, SCE could save money by allowing technical support staff to make better use of their time.

Computerworld (April 4, 2008) One new bit of code in Windows Mobile 6.1 makes this otherwise minor release of Microsoft Corp.'s handheld operating system a watershed for enterprise users. The new code contains hooks into Microsoft 's System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 (MDM), a new server application that is the first major effort by the company to make handhelds as manageable and secure as PCs.