Mads Sørensen

Day 2 of Microsoft Campus Days 2011 started with a sort of keynote session called “A World of Smart Devices” and the speaker was Søren Lau, Director of Channel Group in Denmark, Microsoft.

Søren also talked a lot about “Consumerization of IT” and how this is partly build upon the users walking into the companies with all these smart devices. He hat a lot of all the new smart devices on stage and talk about each of them. One of the devices that I would like to own is the Sony Vaio Z.

Sessions

Now to the day 2 sessions were I attended the following sessions:

• C03 – Implementing of Microsoft Office 365: Plan, Prepare and migrate
• I08 – System Center Service Manager 2012
• I10 – System Center Orchestrator 2012
• I12 – System Center Orchestrator 2012 and Automated Self-Service

C03 – Implementing of Microsoft Office 365: Plan, Prepare and migrate

Speaker: Haythum Auda, Enterprise Techonology Architect, Microsoft & Henrik Jørgensen, Microsoft Arkitekt, Microsoft

I already know a lot of Office 365 and how you are able to implement it into your business, but it’s always good to get a refresh of the knowledge that other people are brining to the table and that way I went to this session and maybe I was able to learn something new or remember something I had forgot (Which I normally never do

I didn’t learn that much new stuff at this session, but one think the two speakers addressed quite good was the point that you need to make sure you have done all the preparation as good as possible, this also include checking all the prerequisites and informing the users as good as possible. They talk about how they always make a “Solution Alignment Workshop“ with the customer/users so they get all tasks in the migration process written down.

I08 – System Center Service Manager 2012

Speaker: Anders Ravnholt, Senior Business Development, Microsoft

This was a very exciting session were I was pleased to see that Microsoft has done a good job by optimizing and adding new features to System Center Service Manager 2012 (SCSM)

The focus in the development of SCSM 2012 has primarily been the following:

• Better self-service portal
• CMDB integration with SCVMM 2012 and System Center Orchestrator 2012.
• Better integration with SCOM, SCCM, AD etc.
• Release Management
• Data Warehouse & Reports with OLAP

Anders also mention that there will be integration from SCOM to Microsoft Azure and then the information’s/alarms will be able to be use in System Center Service Manager.

The SCVMM 2012 & System Center Orchestrator 2012 integration in SCSM 2012 will be able to automatic collect objects from the different library’s at import then into the CMDB. The objects that can be collected could be:

• RunBooks
• Clouds
• Templates
• Services
• VMs
• Fabrics
• Users

In SCSM there are also focus at the service catalog which is a part of the self-service portal, so the users will get a nice overview of which services they have access to.

Anders also showed a demo of how you are able to extract KPI reports directly from Excel via OLAP cubes and PowerPivot, without the need of knowing SQL queries.

I10 – System Center Orchestrator 2012

Speaker: Jakob Gottlieb Svendsen, Senior Consultant from Coretech A/S

Back in December 2009 Microsoft bought the company Opalis Software which is a company that made a product were you can make workflows and orchestrate different tasks in the Microsoft world. Microsoft is now ready to ship the first product made by this acquisition of Opalis and they have named it System Center Orchestrator 2012.

I think there is a huge potential in this product, not only because you are able to automate a lot of administrative task, but because of the extensive integration into other Microsoft products and the rest of the System Center suite.

This was also what Jakob talk a great deal about in this sessions and he could also show how easy it is to make a workflow and integrate it into the self-service portal. He made a demo where he made a workflow where a user can request access to a AD group and before he gets the access it needs an approval by the users manager.

In System Center Orchestrator 2012 the integration to 3. party programs is made by integration packs and a lot of vendors have already made there integration packs, like IBM, VMWare, HP, IBM TSM etc.

There are also starting a big community around System Center Orchestrator and by using the Quick Integration Kit (QIK), users/administrators are able to make there own integration pack to support there infrastructure.

I hope to get some more time to test System Center Orchestrator and hopefully write some more about it.

I12 – System Center Orchestrator 2012 and Automated Self-Service

Speaker: Jonas Ullman, Solutions Architect, GridPro and Patrik Sundqvist, Solutions Architect, GridPro

These two guys made a lot of demos which was really inspiring and made want to try it myself even more.

They made a demo where they where able to provisioning VMs in Hyper-V and also Services in SCVMM and make it accessible form the self-service portal. If you think about it you will in the near future be able to make an IaaS solution.

I also talk to a couple of Microsoft employees after this session and asked them about an integration into Office 365, they mention something about a product/integration pack that might be called “Orchestrator 365”, so lets see if there will be any information about this soon.