MOM 2005 Express On Move

olution providers say they’re looking forward to Microsoft’s plan to introduce a version of its Microsoft Operations Manager product for small and midsize businesses.

The new offering, dubbed Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Express, was unveiled at the company’s annual management software summit in Las Vegas in March and also moved into beta testing last month. Microsoft executives said they aim to ship MOM 2005 and MOM 2005 Express by the end of the year.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant said the Express version will offer most of the same enterprise-level operational management capabilities of MOM 2005 but for small, targeted environments. MOM 2005 Express will provide performance monitoring, built-in application intelligence for identifying IT issues and tools for ensuring high service availability for Windows Server System components—but for a restricted number of servers. MOM 2005, in contrast, provides support for thousands of servers.

Channel partners applauded the debut of a lower-cost management solution.

“One of the frustrations felt by an organization outgrowing and leaving the Small Business Server cocoon is a loss of many of the great management and monitoring tools that SBS includes,” said Marc Harrison, president of Silicon East, Manalapan, N.J. “An SMB version of MOM would not only ease the transition to the full Windows Server environment, but also in many cases might encourage otherwise-hesitant SMB customers to take the plunge.”

MOM 2005 Express will include a new Operations Console that gives a topological view of systems running and highlights system state awareness, enabling customers and their partners to monitor the Windows environment.

 Published for the Week Of April 12, 2004