System Center Operations Manger 2007 Service Pack 1 release plans:

The Operations Manager team is making good progress on readying the first Service Pack for the OpsMgr 2007 product.  The high level themes of this service pack are:

·         Address critical customer initiated issues including roll-up of all hotfixes

·         Make the product easier to support

·         Make the product easier to use

·         Make the product easier to deploy

The first opportunity for our customers to utilize SP1 will be coming up in early November when the Release Candidate version of SP1 will be made available.  This Release Candidate (RC) has undergone extensive testing for quality, stability and performance.  We will be making this RC publically available and encourage customers to make use of it for all their environments, except for production environments where pre-release code is not appropriate.

The reasons the product team is making the RC of the Service Pack generally available are:

·         To give customers evaluating OpsMgr 2007 advance access to the SP to aid in their evaluation and proof of concept deployments

·         To give current OpsMgr 2007 customers that may have hotfixes in their environment an opportunity to test the Service Pack and provide feedback on it

·         Ultimately to make sure that the final RTM release of the Service Pack is of the highest possible quality.

Release Candidate details:

·         This will be publicly available release.  In early November 2007, a link from our home page on www.microsoft.com/opsmgr will help customers find the SP once it is posted.

·         This release will be supported.  Support options include:

o   Newsgroups – there will be a dedicated SP1 newsgroup

o   Microsoft Customer Support Services (CSS) – you can use your standard support options to get support on this edition

o   While CSS support is fully available, the product team is not pledging to provide Hotfixes on the RC, rather hotfix candidates would be incorporated into the final RTM version.

o   Support for the RC will end 30 days after the RTM version is released.

·         This release is fully upgradable to the final RTM version of the Service Pack. 

Final RTM details:

·         To provide for sufficient time to get feedback on the Release Candidate the final (RTM) release of the Service Pack 1 release is targeted for mid-February 2008.

·         This version of the Service Pack will be able to be applied to upgrade the originally released RTM version of Operations Manager 2007 and it will also upgrade Operations Manager 2007 running the Release Candidate of SP1.

More details on what is fixed and enhanced in SP1 will accompany the Release Candidate version along with instructions on how to upgrade your deployment.

Have fun, learn Ops Mgr 2007!! Check out www. systemcentertraining.com for instructor led training on Operations Manager 2007.