Sengupta, David. Tech-Ed Days 3-4. Jun 9, 2005.

Well yesterday went by pretty quickly for me ... Charlie Chung and I delivered our MSG 358 session on Managing Exchange Server with Microsoft Operations Manager ... it went well and we had some good questions afterwards. During my part of the session I focused on reporting in the MOM 2005 context and talked about the native Microsoft Exchange 2003 Management Pack reports (focused on Health i.e., performance and availability), the free (to MOM 2005 customers that is) Quest Exchange Reporting Management Pack (focused on advanced Exchange traffic analysis), the still-future Microsoft Service Level Agreement (SLA) Solution Accelerator (focused on scorecarding and trending data collected via MOM 2005 + Microsoft Exchange MP and using System Center Reporting Manager 2005 ... when it ships ... beta for SLA SA is coming later in June) ... and finally I talked about the Dynamic Configuration Manager (DCM) Solution Accelerator (focused on configuration ... which will permit creation of a configuration "manifest" for each of five Exchange Server roles - mailbox, public folder, front-end, internet gateway and bridgehead - and then reporting of servers that are out of compliance ... and will require SMS 2003 + System Center Reporting Manager 2005 ... when it ships ... beta for DCM SA will also be later in June). Bottom line things went well and we scored reasonably high which was good. Today I attended one talk - namely Kieran's discussion of Exchange compliance - was well done as always and the crowd seemed to be pretty interested. Most folks in the Exchange world are new to thinking about compliance, especially the 'holy grail' of legal compliance that Kieran was discussing ... so it was amusing to see folks start to think about some of the points Kieran raised. His comparison of "adverse inference" with pregnancy was great ... and I appreciated his pointing folks to BPI0008 and ISO 15801.