Medium Business IT Generalist (February 16, 2005)
Published: February 22, 2005
Please note:Portions of this transcript have been edited for clarity
Introduction
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Welcome to today’s chat with Bob Muglia about “Medium Business IT Generalists.” We are pleased to welcome our experts for today. I will have them introduce themselves now.
TomJ_MS (Expert):
Hi - I'm Tom Jones, the Program Mgr for the IT Professional Iniative
Praerit_MSFT (Expert):
Q: This is a test question.
A: Hi, I'm Praerit. I work in Windows Server focusing on providing server management tools & platform
Bob Muglia (Expert):
Hi, I'm Bob Muglia. I'm the Senior Vice President for Windows Server here at Microsoft.
TammysMS (Expert):
I'm Tammy Snow, Manager of Windows Server Usability team
doug_mfst (Expert):
I'm doug Bayer, I am general manager of the Windows management infrastructure team. My products include WMI, Monad, Task Scheduler, scripting languages
Dave_msft (Expert):
I am Dave Danford. I am the marketing manager responsible for Windows Server in the midmarket
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
We will try to answer as many questions as we can today. Participants should type their questions, click “Submit a question,” and click “Send.” Those posts will go into a private queue, from which our experts will draft answers and repost questions in the upper window with their answers. (To confirm: if you clicked “Submit a question” when you posted, you don’t need to resubmit. We’ll get to them as soon as we can before the end of the chat (4p Pacific).
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
We will post a transcript of the upper window within a few days at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/trans/default.mspx.
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Let’s begin the chat.
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Those in the chat: Did you have difficulty joining the chat room?
Start of Chat
TomJ_MS (Expert):
Q: What exactly is an "IT Generalist"?
A: An IT Genrealist is an admin in a medium sized org whose job is "A mile wide and a inch deep". He is responsible for all IT problems that arise in his organization.
Bob Muglia (Expert):
Q: Can you tell us more about the expected support for Windows 2000 server?
A: Windows 2000 is on our standard support policy lifecycle. With extended support, this goes to 10 years. Check out www.microsoft.com\lifecycle
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Any questions for Bob about medium-sized businesses? What sized businesses are you all in?
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Q: e liahck did you get my question
A: To ask a question of our experts, you must click "Submit a question" before you click "Send."
Praerit_MSFT (Expert):
I agree. It is a significant focus of our investment with the work around Windows Server Update Services. It will help you track patches from Windows Update and get then applied to your Windows clients & servers in a control fashion. For more info see www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/wus
Bob Muglia (Expert):
Q: Many IT generalists must deal with a heterogeneous set of systems. These can include Windows and non-Windows systems and a myriad of applications. How does one best manage this type of environment.
A: There are many type of heterogeneous environments. So the specifics answer depends on the exact customer situation. We are focused on several things to help here. First, from an app development perspective, we have been driving the industry to use web services for inter-app communication. This provides a standards-based, vendor neutral set of protocols to allow heterogeneous systems to interoperate.
Another key issue that companies face is heterogeneous management. We are working with partners in the industry to provide heterogeneous support for products like MOM and SMS. As an example, we just announced a partnership with Vintela for this.
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Q: WIN XP IE IS ALL SCREWED UP ON MY PC
A: If you had trouble getting/staying in this chat, please post your symptoms. Thanks.
TomJ_MS (Expert):
Patch management is an area of continued active development. As Clint would say ''We feel your pain"
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Q: I need some sort of "ON SELECT DO" rule or trigger! Need to track "selects" on spesific tables. Spesifically; whenever someone use a browsertemplate to access a certain table, I want to insert a record into a monitoring table. Got a work-around?
A: This is not a forum for SQL questions. Please stay on topic.
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
We are sorry for any inconvenience with IE. We are not able to solicit enough relevant questions to continue this chat. Please join us on March 9 at 11:30a (Pacific) to chat with Kirill Tatarinov, Vice President of the Microsoft Windows Enterprise Management Division, to discuss Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM).
Anne MSFT (Moderator):
Thanks, all.
TomJ_MS (Expert):
Q: What, if anything, can we do to prepare for Longhorn? Is there a newer build than #4074 yet?
A: There is Longhorn information on Microsoft.com. There wlll be a new release at WinHec, but the best bet is to wait for beta 1 by the end of 1st 1/2 2005.
TomJ_MS (Expert):
Q: My understanding of the Vintela partnership is for them to build upon AD and MOM to permit some level of mgmt of *nix systems. Would these use the native SNMP capabilities of these systems or would a Vintela "piece of code" also be needed on the system?
A: I would contact Vintela to answer that question.