There has been much advertisement around the new System Center brand and all of the great things the suite of products will provide to customers, but one of those products has quietly shipped. System Center Essentials 2007 (SCE) is a new product focused on the small to mid-market customer who has 1-3 IT Generalists.

Essentials 2007 is a new management solution in the System Center family of IT systems management products specifically designed for midsized businesses (up to 500 PCs and 30 Servers). Essentials 2007 provides a unified management solution that enables IT professionals in midsize organizations to proactively manage their IT environment with increased efficiency.

SCE leverages the components from System Center Operations Manager 2007 and WSUS 3.0, but puts it all into an easy to deploy and single UI management console. It typically takes only a half-day to deploy, configure, and use in a product environment.

Here's a quick list of things SCE can do for an organization (Taken from the "Top 10 Reasons to Purchase Essentials 2007". Visit the page for details on each of these topics):

• Unify your IT management experience (Essentials 2007 provides a single console for your core management needs.)
• Keep your applications and your network up and running (Essentials provides multiple views of the application data in your network...)
• Troubleshoot problems more quickly (Essentials provides a rich knowledge base out of the box ...)
• Simplify your Patch Management (Essentials 2007 provides integrated patch management ...)
• Deploy Applications easily (Deploying applications has never been so easy...)
• Keep track of hardware and software assets (No more spreadsheets to maintain ...)
• Improve your users up-time (Reduce the time you spend dealing with end-user issues ...)
• Get up and running fast (Deploying Essentials 2007 couldn't be easier...)
• Gain visibility into your IT environment (Start your day with a Daily Health Report...)
• Get an affordable comprehensive IT Management solution designed for you (Essentials is priced for the budgets of midsize businesses...)

For an organization with 15 servers and 20-400 clients, this is a slam dunk of a product!

For partners, this is a great addition to your services and solution offerings. In most Windows Infrastructure deployments, an SI will add in a half day to deploy WSUS. Now that time should be used to deploy SCE.

There is also a managed service component that is currently in Beta that will allow an SI partner/Hoster to manage a collection of customer deployments of SCE via Operations Manager 2007! This is very exciting as the customer will have their own management product on premise, but the SI partner/Hoster can provide high level management services (and ongoing application deployments, management, and issue resolution) from their own datacenter. In this model, the Partner is paying for their own OpsMgr deployment and the customer is licensing SCE on their own.

You can download the 90-day trial version and then upgrade it to the Full Version by using a tool that comes with the product (after you purchase it of course). http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/eval/sce/default.mspx

Here is some additional information on System Center Essentials 2007

• System Center Essentials: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/sce/default.mspx
• System Center Essentials 2007 Tech Center: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sce/default.mspx
• System Center Essentials 2007 FAQ: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sce/2007/evaluate/faq.mspx
• Forefront and System Center Essentials 2007: http://www.microsoft.com/infrastructure/default.mspx
• Forefront and System Center Essentials 2007 press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-02SecManPR.mspx

Make sure to check out the upcoming webcast on System Center Essentials on May 24^th: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032336458&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US