Managing the IT infrastructure of a mid-sized business presents problems that are quite different from those faced by staff at larger organisations. Although many of the challenges that staff deal with on a day to day basis are the same – diagnosing and fixing IT problems, helping end users and managing multiple systems and applications – IT staff numbers in mid-sized companies tend to be far lower, and skill sets are necessarily more broad with few, if any, specialist technicians to call on.

System management software has the potential to make the efficient management of IT infrastructure much easier for mid-sized companies, but there's a catch. Many of the tools available today are either point solutions for specific applications aimed at enterprise IT departments, and are thus too complex and specialised to be used fully without time-consuming specialist training, or they are simpler tools that lack the scope and features required to be truly effective.

It's precisely to address this that Microsoft has introduced System Center Essentials 2007, a single, unified management system that proactively monitors, updates and troubleshoots IT infrastructures with up to 500 PCs and 30 servers. As the name indicates, most of the features in System Center Essentials 2007 have been taken from members of Microsoft's enterprise class System Center family of management products, and integrated into a single unified management application.

Using Essentials 2007, system administrators can manage an entire medium-sized company infrastructure including:

• Manage servers, clients, hardware, software and IT services from a single unified management console
• Monitor and troubleshoot systems and end-user problems
• Deploy software and install security and application updates from a single, centralised location.

Companies with very limited IT staff will be able to benefit from Essentials 2007 without tying up human resources unnecessarily. That's because with Essentials 2007 monitoring the corporate infrastructure from a server, a service partner running Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager will be able to connect to Essentials to manage the infrastructure remotely. This is particularly useful for companies who want to hand off day-to-day infrastructure management so their IT staff can involve themselves in projects that add value to the business, or those with IT staff numbers too limited to provide 24-hour management coverage. Existing staff may thus manage the network during the day, with monitoring and troubleshooting responsibilities passed to a partner after hours.

One of the central tenets underpinning Essentials 2007 is simplicity: not in its functionality, but in the way that information is presented and can be acted upon. Essentials 2007 does this through a single management console that presents a complete view of all of the organisation's servers, clients, hardware, software and IT services. This enables a single administrator, at a glance, to get an instant overview of the state of the entire IT infrastructure, to view and act on alerts, and to carry out common management tasks. This makes management far simpler and more effective than the alternative: attempting to work with a variety of different tools, with different interfaces, from an assortment of vendors, some of which have been designed for much larger enterprise IT environments.

Reporting functionality is also included in Essentials 2007, using SQL Server 2005 Express, which is installed at installation time (unless an existing SQL Server 2005 database is specified). More than 30 pre-configured reports are included with Essentials 2007, including update compliance, capacity planning and software deployment.

Quick and Easy Deployment
The good news for staff in smaller IT departments is that Essentials 2007 is quick and easy to deploy: in fact it is usually possible to get it up and running in less than an hour. That's because the software uses simple wizards for installation, automatic device discovery, security configuration and group policy and update settings. Certificates are also configured and deployed automatically. If Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 Workgroup Edition or Windows Server Update Services 2.0 or 3.0 are in use already, these can be upgraded to Essentials 2007 while preserving information like upgrading metadata and groups and approvals, or Essentials 2007 can be run along side.

Once it's up and running, another key tenet of Essentials 2007 is proactivity. This means checking for updates to keeping systems and applications up to date with the latest security patches, and spotting problems as soon as they occur so they can be diagnosed and corrected before they turn into major incidents that threaten business operations.

Because Essentials 2007 is aimed at companies with smaller IT departments, it is not assumed that system administrators have specialist technical knowledge of every application under management. To help ensure efficient administration, management packs for Windows server and client operating systems, and key applications including Office, Exchange, Active Directory and SQL are shipped and installed with the product, providing expert knowledge to help prevent and solve problems, and in-line links to click and "fix it now."

One of the most time-consuming activities for system administrators is the deployment of new software onto client machines. This is especially the case in organisations with branch offices without resident IT staff. The only practical way to handle organisation-wide rollouts of applications like Office 2007 is to perform the installations remotely from a central location, and Essentials 2007 makes this easy to do using a software deployment wizard. This helps create packages to deploy Microsoft (and non-Microsoft) applications and patches and device drivers to defined groups of computers.

The need for effective systems management software is evidenced by the strong demand over the last few years. In 2006, global systems management software sales were about $11 billion according to research house Gartner, and this is forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual rate of 8.7 percent to reach over $17 billion in 2011.

The problem for companies using this type software has historically been the number of products from different vendors needed to work side by side to create a complete management solution. The exception to this has been Microsoft's System Center family, which has emerged as a formidable product and perhaps the only completely integrated solution for the Windows enterprise.

With Essentials 2007, Microsoft has taken this a stage further, providing everything necessary for the efficient management and administration in the sub-enterprise level market, in a single unified product. It's likely that Essentials 2007 will become the de-facto standard for the management of Microsoft-based IT infrastructure in mid-sized organizations.