Although it has been much discussed since its announcement in March, SMS 2003 was officially launched only this week. In Europe, the announcement came at Microsoft's IT Forum event in Copenhagen and was accompanied by an announcement that cements a partnership with Dell for managing its systems.
The announcements came in a keynote speech from Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Enterprise Management Division. Tatarinov has overseen the introduction of major management features in Windows Server 2003, the introduction of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and the revitalising of SMS.
The key strategy, known as the Dynamic Systems Initiative, ties together the knowledge that resides within development and operations teams to create a workable set of business policies and configuration rules. As a part of this, every major Microsoft product now comes with its own Management Pack - a set of rules that can be incorporated into the MOM or SMS implementation.
SMS 2003 comes with features to support asset management, patch management, software distribution, Windows management and mobile features. The asset management is an enhanced inventory capability that supports the other SMS functions but can, also, be fed into full-blown asset management solutions from third parties.
It is the movement of software and files that catches the eye. A structured process exists to manage patch updates and the delivery of applications. Clearly much effort has gone into making this the centrepiece of SMS 2003 with Microsoft claiming 99.9% software distribution reliability in an environment that is significantly more scalable than previous SMS versions.
Comparisons with earlier versions of SMS can never be valid since, historically, management was not one of Microsoft's strengths. SMS existed in many organisations only because it used to come as a part of the same Back Office suite that was used to implement early versions of SQL Server. Whilst the database has moved on over the years, SMS has remained something of a dead product until now.
However, it is clear that the big drive for security and manageability within Microsoft has meant that SMS has developed - to the extent that Dell has taken some of its principles on board.
The second announcement concerned Dell's alignment with Microsoft to provide an integrated approach to patch management. This means that purchasers of Dell hardware will be able to go to Dell's website and download automatically updates to hardware drivers, firmware and even BIOS software. In addition to this, Dell will be able to feed hardware event information through to MOM.
There was nothing much new here that hasn't been in the public domain since Microsoft first announced SMS 2003. However, what is clear from attendees in Copenhagen is that, this time, the product has been in use on customer sites for a while and, on the whole, it is a popular release.
