Foundations - Management - An Introduction

In today’s complex and dynamic IT environments, change is no longer the exception – indeed the only constant is often the rate of change. As new applications and services are developed, deployed and upgraded, a variety of changes are required in the underlying infrastructure. With uptime and availability the key metrics of success, the power to manage this level of change is critical for success of the business.

Microsoft’s management products and platforms are designed with this fast-changing environment in mind with powerful features to help plan, deploy, configure and monitor your critical applications, services, servers and network. When combined with partner solutions, these products offer you the ability to manage your entire infrastructure, including those servers and applications not operating in a Windows environment.

Recognizing the critical role that systems management plays in improving network security and service availability, Microsoft has designed a set of technologies and services to enhance performance and help protect your environment from malicious attacks. These services stress a consistent approach, systematic monitoring, and effective distribution of security updates to:

• Minimize unplanned system downtime and protect against lost revenue, customer dissatisfaction, and vulnerability to competitors.
• Help ensure that IT always has up-to-date, network-wide data about the health of your information systems so those systems continually operate at peak performance.
• Lower the costs of security management through the implementation of tools and best practices for network monitoring and security update distribution.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a strategic imperative for most organizations. Businesses are seeing a huge explosion of structured and unstructured information that includes documents, e-mail messages, voice mail, and video. There are many challenges to make information quickly and easily available to users of all levels and preserve that information for audit and compliance purposes. Microsoft is driving innovation in ECM with the upcoming release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that provides a broad set of ECM functionality on a unified platform. This solution scales to meet the needs of the most intensive ECM tasks and makes ECM available to every information worker in the organization.

Microsoft has recently announced it will make significant investments in its digital rights management (DRM) technologies to enable a new offering and drive scenarios that support the wireless industry. As wireless delivery of content to mobile handsets continues to grow at a rapid pace, this commitment of resources and manpower will help enable next-generation mobile entertainment scenarios for consumers. Microsoft Windows Media DRM is broadly licensed and deployed by more than 100 content services and on hundreds of devices. The platform helps protect and securely deliver content for playback on computers, mobile devices and portable devices. It supports a wide range of business models that include download and play, subscription, and video on demand, and enables device manufacturers to directly acquire licenses on their handsets.

Top of page