Wow what an exciting week in the System Center space! Lately there has been several free tools released for various System Center products in the community. I wanted to mention them here in one blog.
Service Manager: Advanced Send Mail
This one is very cool and something that has been needed for some time. Big thanks to the teams at Cireson and itnetx for releasing this to the community for free! This gives you a full email client experience from the Service Manager console. Benefits of this are:
- Simplicity in deployment and configuration, without any requirement of XML editing.
- Analysts can attach files to the outbound email.
- The analyst can choose a notification template, see the content of the message body based on the template and change the text before sending the email.
- The analyst can optionally add the message body to the action log of the incident automatically.
- The analyst can add additional recipients to the To or CC before sending the email.
- The admin can configure an SMTP server to use to send the email.
- The admin can filter the list of available notification templates based on a naming convention.
Download it here: http://www.cireson.com/app-store/scsm-advanced-send-email/
Operations Manager: MP Author
This one is a free management pack authoring tool released to the community by Silect Software. This free tool lets you design, develop and customize management packs for SCOM. You can also configure discoveries, targets, rules and monitors with it. This tool is wizard driven and is pre-populated. It is a scaled back version of their MP studio but will still get you on your way for authoring your own management packs for SCOM.
Download it here: https://bridgeways.com/mp-author-landing-page
Data Protection Manager/Operations Manager: SCOM DPM Dashboard
This one is a dashboard that gives you a bird’s eye view of your DPM environment from within SCOM. I could see this being very handy if you have more multiple DPM servers in your environment. I could also see this being useful to help you determine if DPM is in an error state because of protected data or a problem with a DPM server or any of its hardware such as tape library or disks etc. This one is made available to the community from AIO Technology.
It can be downloaded here: http://www.aiotechnology.com/scom-dpm-dashboard/
It is great to see companies also supporting the community with free tools like these. As always there is a lot going on in the community all the time. I found the best way to keep up with everything is through following the right people on twitter. This will lead you to blogs, whitepapers, articles, free tools, videos and more. Speaking of videos another good way to get a weekly summary on what is happening in the community is a two part video series by Lee Berg of Concurrency. He has a You Tube channel with a series on This Week in Service Manager and Private Cloud Weekly RoundUp. You can find it on You Tube here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/LeeAlanBerg/videos
