Geoffrey Chollar's System Center Weblog

New MPViewer available over at Boris’ Blog

gchollar — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:45:21 +0000

For those of you that don’t know about the MPViewer, it is a great Operations Manager tool for viewing Management Pack configuration. The new version can be found here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2008/06/03/mpviewer-1-5-performance-rules-and-monitors.aspx

Recently attended MMS 2008….

gchollar — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:37:42 +0000

Hello all,

I recently attended MMS 2008 in Las Vegas, and thought that this year was a great year (I’ve been attending for the last 5 years). Anyways, I have alot of cool stuff to post, I just need to find a bit of time first Hopefully I will have a few new articles up within the next 2 weeks.

Cheers! – Geoff

Book: System Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed

gchollar — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:05:53 +0000

So the UPS guy just dropped off this book to my house today, and I must say…. this beast of a book is exactly what I have been waiting to come out since Operations Manager 2007 was released. Just through a quick 15 minute browsing of the chapters I can already tell that it has far more information than anything that has been released thus far. Good job Guys! (by the way, besides visiting their blogs from time to time I do not know any of the authors). If you’re interested in getting the book, you can find it here:

http://www.amazon.com/System-Center-Operations-Manager-Unleashed/dp/0672329557/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207260306&sr=8-1

Free Scheduled Tasks MP from Innovativ

gchollar — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:27:24 +0000

Here is a link to a freely available MP that monitors Scheduled Tasks. In certain situations this can be very useful.

http://www.inovativ.nl/pagina/downloads

Finally! The Cluster Services MP for Ops Mgr 2007 has been released!

gchollar — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:32:06 +0000

If you are not running Service Pack 1, you will need to install the included hotfix (KB945312). If you are running Service Pack 1 you do not need to install the hotfix, just simply import the .mp files as usual.

You can find the Cluster MP here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ac7f42f5-33e9-453d-a923-171c8e1e8e55&DisplayLang=en

You can find more detailed information on the following blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mariussutara/archive/2008/03/04/mp-for-monitoring-cluster-services-mscs-finally-web-released.aspx

- Geoff

Publish Reports to Sharepoint

gchollar — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:28:48 +0000

Seems there is alot of good stuff on Operations Manager floating around lately. A how to guide on publishing reports to sharepoint can be found over on the Operations Manager product team blog:

http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/archive/2008/02/29/publish-reports-to-sharepoint.aspx

Report Authoring Guide for Operations Manager and Essentials 2007 is now available

gchollar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:27:31 +0000

I saw this posted over on www.systemcenterforum.org (a great System Center site by the way), and figured I would help spread the word. Report Authoring can get tricky, so it’s nice to finally have a guide available.

The Report Authoring Guide can be found here:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/4/d/74deff5e-449f-4a6b-91dd-ffbc117869a2/OpsMgr2007_RprtGuide.doc.

Cheers! – Geoff

Operations Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 is Now Available

gchollar — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:11:38 +0000

Service Pack 1 (SP1) is an update to Operations Manager 2007 that addresses feedback from our customers. The high level themes of Operations Manager 2007 SP1 are to make the product easier to deploy, easier to use, and easier to support.

The main Operations Manager SP1 page can be found here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/opsmgr/cc280350.aspx

XML Notepad

gchollar — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:25:46 +0000

I just thought I would post a link to Microsoft’s free XML Notepad tool. I have found it very useful when parsing through XML files (in both SCCM and SCOM).

Handy features include:

Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
Good performance on large XML documents, loading a 3mb document in about one second.
Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes and enumerated simple type values.
Support for custom editors for date, dateTime and time datatypes and other types like color.
Handy nudge tool bar buttons for quick movement of nodes up and down the tree.
Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
Built-in XML Diff tool.
Support for XInclude
Dynamic help from XSD annotations.
Goto definition to navigate includes and XSD schema information.

You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=72d6aa49-787d-4118-ba5f-4f30fe913628&displaylang=en

Excerpts from the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Administrator’s Companion Chapter 11

gchollar — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:44:15 +0000

I saw this posted over on www.myitforum.com and found it interesting. The book from the same authors for SMS 2003 was excellent, so I am really looking forward to this being released! (as of now it is listed as being released on 02.20.08). Anyway’s , here is a link to the excerpts and a podcast:

http://www.myitforum.com/articles/42/view.asp?id=11341