IT Management Designed for Midsize Businesses
Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 (Essentials 2007) is a new management solution in the System Center family of IT systems management products. Essentials is specifically designed for IT professionals working in midsize businesses who often face IT challenges similar to those of larger enterprisestroubleshooting end user problems, automating management tasks, managing multiple systems, and diagnosing and resolving IT problems.
System Center Essentials 2007 provides a unified management solution that enables IT professionals in midsize organizations to proactively manage their IT environment with increased efficiency.
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Unified Experience
Essentials 2007 provides a unified solution to help optimize the experience of performing a broad set of tasks across your entire IT environment. You also get a single console from which you can view and manage your servers, clients, hardware, software, and IT services.
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Proactive Management
Essentials 2007 accelerates troubleshooting and problem resolution. Its a self-managing solution that notifies you as soon as a problem occurs, then helps you proactively diagnose and fix it, accelerating problem resolution. Essentials 2007 also automates system updates and data collection for your IT environment, so its more secure and up-to-date.
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Increased Efficiency
Essentials 2007 simplifies complex management tasks like packaging and deploying software, adding Web site monitoring, and creating and configuring group policy. Essentials 2007 wizards also help you quickly and easily configure security settings, deploy updates, and discover assets.
Features
Unified Experience
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Feature
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New or updated in SP1
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Description
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Unified reporting
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Unified reporting, based on the SQL 2005 reporting engine, is provided to help you easily run, review, save, print, or email information about the status of your IT environment. Essentials 2007 provides you with more than 30 preconfigured reports upon installation to cover your reporting needs. These reports cover things like: asset inventory, status of your IT environment, capacity planning, software deployment, and update compliance. You can even configure Essentials 2007 to email a comprehensive daily status report first thing in the morning.
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Expert knowledge
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yes
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With Essentials 2007, you get a breadth of expert knowledge for managing your important platforms, applications, and workloads. This knowledge includes support and diagnostic information for things like Windows Server and client operating systems, Active Directory, Office, Exchange, SQL, and IIS. For Service Pack 1, all the management packs have been tuned and enhanced.
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Overview pages
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The unified console provides single screen overview pages with summary information; common tasks, alerts, and reports, allowing you to quickly check the status of your IT environment. From these pages, you can quickly drill down to get information to fix any IT issues you might see. Logically organized spaces or panes have been created for each management area like Computers, Monitoring, and Updates. You can also customize the views to suit your needs. Diagram views of your IT environment are also provided, from which you can drill down to perform tasks or get more detailed information. Service Pack 1 incorporates several enhancements in terms of speed, layout, and usability of the console.
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Central distribution of updates and software
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Using the same central console from which you monitor your IT environment, you can assess, configure, and distribute updates, plus install software to groups and computers you want to target.
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Proactive Management
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Feature
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New or updated in SP1
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Description
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Integrated troubleshooting
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yes
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Essentials 2007 enables you to receive notification of any problems and troubleshoot more efficiently and effectively by offering integrated problem resolution for clients, servers, and services like Exchange Server. With Essentials 2007, you get:
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Support and diagnostic information for Windows Server and client operating systems, Active Directory, Office, Exchange, SQL, IIS, DPM, and CRM 3.0
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Definitive information right in the console that will help you prevent and solve problems with your IT resources
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In-line links to click and fix it now
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Remote control support for managed client and server computers
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Notification of problems via email, pager, or SMS text message
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Self-managing
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Essentials 2007 is a self-managing solution that can alert you to performance problems or when updates are required for your IT environment. Essentials 2007 automatically checks for new updates available and applicable to your IT environment and provides notification and access reports on update deployment progress to help you quickly troubleshoot any update deployment issues.
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Secure and up to date
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Upon installation, Essentials 2007 allows you to immediately assess, configure, and patch your IT environment without interrupting your users or network service. The provided configuration wizard allows you to easily set the update behavior for clients and servers on your network. You can define update parameters such as which products to patch and types of updates to push out, or simply install immediately on demand. Essentials 2007 also supports automatic deployment of updates for Microsoft operating systems, hardware updates, drivers, and software applicationsboth Microsoft and non-Microsoft. Support for a shared update schema also allows you to import catalogs from non-Microsoft update providers. Because Essentials 2007 checks for new updates applicable to your environment, and provides notification, you can make appropriate and timely update decisions.
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Asset visibility and inventory
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Essentials 2007 automates the collection of software and hardware inventory so you can review assets for optimum configuration and compliance. You can perform searches, filter, and run reports on your inventory to generate updated lists of all installed software applications and hardware inventory attributes for compliance and inventory reports.
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Increased Efficiency
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Feature
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New or updated in SP1
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Description
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Easy update configuration
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The provided update configuration wizard allows you to easily set the update behavior for clients and servers on your network. You can define update parameters such as which products to patch and types of updates to push out, or simply install immediately on demand. Using the wizard, you can quickly and correctly set the initial update configuration for your IT environment. Once updates are configured, you can manually or automatically deploy updates for Microsoft operating systems, hardware updates, third-party updates, drivers, and Microsoft and non-Microsoft software applications to ensure the security of your IT environment. Service Pack 1 adds the ability to customize different approval settings by update groups and a much improved 3rd party update import wizard.
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Simple software deployment
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A simple wizard quickly walks you through the process of deploying software by creating a package and targeting installation on clients and servers in your network. You can deploy MSI and non-MSI applications, drivers, Microsoft and non-Microsoft QFEs. You can accurately target your software installations by grouping computers and defining command line configurations. You dont have to snapshot an install image on a separate computer or enter command line syntax to designate a silent install. Using the wizard, you can simply browse to an .msi or .exe package, walk through a three-step process, and deploy it to clients and servers in your IT environment. The wizard takes care of the complex parts of the process while allowing you to specify where the software is installed, set an install deadline, track installation progress, or troubleshoot the installation.
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Quick product install and configuration
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Using a simple installation wizard, you can get up and running in less than an hour. There is no need to worry about configuring group policy, installing databases, or setting security. If youre currently using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 2.0 or 3.0, you can upgrade to Essentials 2007 during setup. This upgrade will preserve existing update information. If you currently have MOM 2005, or MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition installed in your IT environment, you can easily migrate to Essentials 2007. You can also choose to establish side-by-side operation with Essentials 2007 to preserve mission critical data. With Service Pack 1, the setup process has been improved to handle a variety of environments, including Windows Server 2008 and new tools for disaster recovery have been added. The overall memory footprint for the Essentials server has been reduced by 70%, for a more efficient and smooth operation on your existing infrastructure.
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Automatic discovery of computers and devices
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The Computer and Device Management Wizard quickly walks you through the process of selecting the computers and devices to be managed in your IT environment. As new clients or other machines come on-line, for example, a new laptop joining your domain, you can select to have Essentials 2007 start managing it right away. With Service Pack 1, Essentials can discover and monitor both SNMP v1 and v2 devices.
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Customized monitoring
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You can add monitoring without being an expert by using provided templates. For example, using the provided wizard you can create monitoring for your website, a database, or file share. You can also custom configure monitoring to suit the organization of your IT environment by business unit, location, and/or job function.
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 Here are the ten most valuable benefits that Microsoft System Center Essentials 2007 can provide to your organization.
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Unify your IT management experience
Essentials 2007 provides a single console for your core management needs. That means a single product to purchase, deploy and learn. Server, Desktop and Network monitoring, software and update management and asset inventory under a single, easy to use, unified experience.
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Keep your applications and your network up and running
Essentials provides multiple views of the application data in your network. Track database growth in SQL Server databases or connectivity to Exchange servers using some of the many provided charts, tables and reports. Essentials also tracks the status of all the SNMP 1.0 and 2.0 devices in your network, allowing you to receive alerts when something important goes down
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Troubleshoot problems more quickly
Accidents happen, systems go down. That is why Essentials provides a rich knowledge base out of the box to help you diagnose and fix critical alerts for key products like Exchange Server and SQL Server. These management packs are optimized so you only focus on those alerts that matter. Not only do you get in-depth explanations of problems, but more importantly, Essentials often provides simple in-line tasks to click and fix it now. Additional management packs are available from Microsoft and 3rd party providers for both Windows and non-windows environments.
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Simplify your patch management
Essentials 2007 provides integrated patch management for Microsoft products in the Microsoft Update catalog. Additionally weve worked with key industry vendors to integrate their updates into Essentials providing a single point of control for patch Management. You can choose to automatically deploy critical updates or have them be subject for approval, and track compliance across your network. Want the patch deployed now? No problem, just click a button to initiate deployment real time.
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Deploy applications easily
Deploying applications has never been so easy. Using a simple 3 step wizard you can deploy applications to a target set of computers without worrying about having to deal with packaging or other complex processes. Ready for Office 2007? Essentials can help you deploy Office 2007 with your custom settings in a snap. Additionally Essentials uses Background Intelligent Transfer Service 2.0 (BITS) to optimize traffic over your network. Changed your mind? Dont worry, its even easier to un-install a previously deployed application.
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Keep track of hardware and software assets
No more spreadsheets to maintain - Essentials 2007 gathers more than 60 hardware attributes and a complete inventory of the applications running on each machine. A summary inventory is available for quick troubleshooting or in the detailed report by machine groups.
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Improve your users up-time
Reduce the time you spend dealing with end-user issues with features like Agentless Exception Monitoring (AEM) which allows you to collect application and OS errors that would otherwise remain anonymous. Use built in tasks to remotely execute important tasks on users computers, from performing a simple ipconfig to a remote desktop session, all without leaving the management console.
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Get up and running fast
Deploying Essentials 2007 couldnt be easier; the smart setup will check for prerequisites to ensure you have a smooth and successful installation. Post-installation configuration is quickly completed using three simple wizards. The built-in integration with Active Directory will allow you to manage a computer automatically the moment its added to your environment without any intervention.
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Gain visibility into your IT environment
Start your day with a Daily Health Report, providing a quick status of your IT environment and any action items required. For more detail, go to the Essentials console and consult the more than 180 reports out of the box that help you gain better insight into how your IT environment is performing.
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Get an affordable comprehensive IT management solution designed for you
Essentials is priced for the budgets of midsize businesses, allowing you to purchase only what you need and then grow as your business requires it, with flexible licenses for up to 30 servers and 500 clients at a fraction of what typical management solutions cost.
System Center Essentials Server Requirements
Hardware
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12 GB of free disk space (20 GB to store updates, locally)
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CPU is x86 or x64-based, at least 2.0 GHz
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1 GB of RAM (2 GB, recommended)
Managed Computer Requirements
Client Computers
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Windows 2000 Professional SP4
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Windows XP SP2 (x86 or x64-based)
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Windows Vista (x86 or x64-based)
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Virtual clients with above operating systems
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