I have to admit that personally this has been one of the most eagerly anticipated Management Pack releases for some time, not only because OCS is probably THE Hottest technologies coming out of Microsoft at the moment but also because the OCS team gained a couple of true Rock stars from the OpsMgr product teams some time ago in Management Pack specialist Peter Schmatz and Reporting legend Thomas Theiner, when I heard that these two guys had defected the first thing I asked them was "when are we going to see a new OCS MP", with these two guys behind it, this MP was always going to be a giant and these boys have not disappointed.

This is a brand new "native" MP, not a converted one from MOM 2005, which you may have expected from the first version and really does use lots of the new features in OpsMgr unlike many of the existing converted ones.

I questioned Thomas earlier this week on this milestone release.......

"What we did is take a working copy of the Wave 13 (OCS 2007 R2) MP and adapt it in our build tree for OCS 2007 RTM.

We got the starting of the type Infrastructures, the new views, way reduced noise, fixed bugs that nobody complained and found before, etc.

The Wave 13 MP will in some weeks contain some reports, will get synthetic transactions (ST) first for IM/Presence, Knowledge, Tasks, Health rollups based on the STs.

With the next generation MP this functionality will be extended to the entire product.

This is a Management Attack - targeted at getting one of the most complex products in Microsoft a breeze for Administrators to manage."

I have to say first impressions on the pack are extremely good, it has a slightly different, more streamlined look and feel in the monitoring pane, giving you a breakdown of each of the complex areas of the product, along with a very straightforward, no nonsense, alert and performance view rather than the normal deluge of State, diagram and dashboard type views.

Under the covers it does not disappoint either with a very accurate class structure and taking full advantage of many of the different monitor type's available in the product, and really does highlight just how seriously the OCS team is taking management of their very exciting and technology leading platform.

In my opinion this is a very credible first version and with much more promised with the R2 version including the all important reporting element (and as Thomas is the ex-reporting PM for MOM\OpsMgr you can bet these will be top draw), this is a good testament to Microsoft's and in particular Tom Mcleery's (head of the OpsMgr Management Pack team) committment to producing top quality Management Packs moving forward.

Test drive it now on your OCS 2007 implementation.....

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A1832431-54B7-4070-9B10-14EFB231FF0C&displaylang=en&displaylang=en