I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
Bless her cotton socks, good old SMS2003 moves out of mainstream support at the end of January 12th of Jan 2010, and it's site on the microsoft domain has had a refresh and has now become more of a portal to assist in migrating from SMS2003 to ConfigMgr. This doesn't mean it is no longer supported by MS, just means it moves from mainstream support to extended support($$$).
Jeff Wettlaufer recently blogged about this:
This week SMS 2003 moves out of mainstream support, and enters what is called Extended Support. This is a natural transition for every Microsoft product. Information about the SMS 2003 product lifecycle can be found here.
SMS 2003 has been an incredibly popular product, and has been considered the most widely deployed management tool in the world. Many customers who at some time were running a version of SMS have since migrated to Configuration Manager 2007, but we recognize this is not the case for everyone.
The industry has moved at a pace unparalleled by most. Technology has accelerated in capability, adoption, depth, breadth, and complexity. From a management perspective, the landscape configuration management technology embraces has grown from basic inventory and software distribution to new areas like OS deployment, Virtualization, Asset/ Performance and Workflow management, data protection, NAP and model based configuration management. In addition to capabilities, new working styles, scenarios, users (Gen ‘Y’) and security models have become daily routine for Administrators.
The management landscape has changed, there is no debating it.
System Center Configuration Manager 2007 is in the 4th release since SMS 2003. With a 5th (R3) entering beta soon, and with the mainstream support cycle ending for SMS 2003, we wanted to collect as much assistance as possible
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