Microsoft Sept. 18 released the first public beta of its collection of tools designed to help small and midsized businesses better manage their network resources.
The System Center Essentials (SCE) 2007, which was first introduced last year, is now in the second round of beta testing. The Beta 2, which was released on Monday, is available publicly for download from the Microsoft Web site.
The platform incorporates elements of Systems Management Server (now known as System Center Configuration Manager), Microsoft Operations Manager (now known as System Center Operations Manager) and Windows Software Update Services, Microsoft’s free patch download service for corporate users.
SCE 2007 is another piece of the puzzle for Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative, which is designed to create a Windows-based management platform. The company is creating a line of management tools under the System Center name.
“This is the first management product from us built from the ground up and focused on the needs of IT people in small to medium sized businesses,” said Eric Berg, director of product management for Microsoft.
The SCE tools are specifically designed for midsize companies to secure, update, monitor and track servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services using just a single console.
SCE 2007 features an installation wizard that gets users up and running quickly by automatically creating and configuring Group Policy, security certificates, and installing SQL Server 2005 Express as the default database reporting engine. Users can opt to use an existing SQL Server 2005 database to support the reporting features. The software automatically discovers the nodes to be managed on a network and provides a set of templates to configure monitoring duties. Users also can centrally deploy software using SCE 2007.
In July at its annual Partners Conference, Microsoft said it would also encourage partners to use the Essentials offering as a hook for offering remote management services to users who install SCE 2007. Those partners could use System Center Operations Manager 2007 to provide remote software deployment, update management, monitoring and troubleshooting over a secure Internet connection using SCE 2007 as the local integration point, according to Andy Lees, corporate vice president, server and tools marketing at Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Berg said he also expects partners to build management tools that can plug into the SCE 2007 console. ”SCE will grow in functionality over time,” Berg says.
Microsoft also plans to bundle SCE 2007 with another SMB tool called Centro Server, which was unveiled last year and is slated to ship in 2008.
Centro will bring together Longhorn Server, Exchange Server and security technologies for mid-sized companies into a single server. It is aimed at users with 25 and 500 PCs connected to the Internet. Centro will be exclusively 64-bit and optimized for x64 hardware. The introduction of Centro came on the heels of a July 2005 SMB offering called Windows Server System for Midsize Business, a specially priced bundle of Windows Server, Exchange Server and Microsoft Operations Manager Workgroup Edition.
