This talk by David Hamilton almost didn’t happen. David called the night before the workshop was scheduled to start to let us know that he couldn’t be there. Well, this didn’t sit well with us. So we let the other Microsoft people who were there know that we were upset about this. The next thing you know, I’ve got e-mail from David saying that he’s cleared his schedule and can make it. We were quite pleased that Microsoft thought enough of this workshop to make sure that David had time to present SMS to us.

SMS is a product that everyone needs but no one really likes. Most folks buy it to do software management. Well, it will do that… sort of. It’s much better at inventory. But there are new technologies emerging which will extend the functionality of SMS in the arena of software distribution.

Microsoft's Systems Management group is spearheading another new development: Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). This is somewhat of a bad title, since WBEM has nothing to do with the web. Essentially, WBEM is to systems management as SNMP is to network management, although WBEM will not be constrained to just systems. The goal is to provide a common layer and interface for getting at information about a system. That information could be software config info, user info, hardware info, network stats or performance data - it doesn't matter - the WBEM layer will bring it all together and translate it if necessary. WBEM is being included in both Windows 98 and NT 5.0 and promises to greatly improve the manageability of these platforms by products such as SMS.

Information on WBEM is at http://wbem.freerange.com

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