Its a brand new world out there.

This is all very new to me, its seems very strange writing to an audience i don't know.

Anyway, welcome one and all.

I don't want to waste your time I know you probably have thousands of Blogs to check. A little about myself and this blog.

My name is Craig, I work for Microsoft on SMS (Systems Management Server) primarily on performance and scale issues/designs. Prior to this I worked in the “real-world” as a consultant for 8 years designing and deploying SMS/Exchange/Windows solutions for enterprise customers. I'm originally from New Zealand (but did not get thanked at the Oscars!). I moved to the States to get more enperience with large scale deployments. Well that i did! Never thought i'd have to manage 20,000+ SMS servers and 120,000 machines. NZ only has one or 2 companies that have 20,000 employees!!!

I started this Blog as a means to discuss and debate SMS enterprise designs and issues, both to help other consultants (don't tell my boss, but i still see myself as a consultant first) deploy SMS successfully and to generate feedback so i can improve the product before its gets to you.

Warning! Warning! Self promotion of product coming up!!!!

SMS2003 rocks! I started at MS at the beginning of the development cycle for 2003. We worked really hard to improve the scale/perf aspects of the product. Being in the field and working with SMS2.0 i had a pretty good idea where these improvements were needed. We targeted to support 100,000 directly reporting advanced clients on a single Primary Site and 25,000 advanced clients per Management Point. We also improved inventory processing at the PS across the board, as well as improving software distribution processing on the PS from daily to hourly.

Besides working and testing the product, a Product Manager (Muki) and I have developed a SMS Hierarchy Capacity and Hardware Sizer tool. For those of you at MMS this year, this was demo'd as the “SMS Hardware Sizer” by Steve. This I know will be a big deal to a lot of you. It is currently undergoing field testing my PSS/MCS and all going well I expect to ship it this summer.

Well thats all for now.

If you have any questions you'd like me to answer in this forum or suggestions for topics/articles let me know.

Cheers.

PS. Thanks Uwe for reminding me to define SMS. SMS In my case refers to Systems Management Server, not Short Message Service. :)