SCOM R2 RC: RTFM

When one installs SCOM R2 RC the Console is really different compared to the older versions. But these are just the looks. The real changes are to be found inside SCOM itself.

MUCH has changed. All I can say is...

Read The Friendly Manual(s)

Microsoft has delivered many guides in conjunction with SCOM R2 RC. Eventhough many of these guides contains placeholders, the information within these documents is certainly worthwhile to be read.

To keep track of what guides to read and in what order, every guide contains a roadmap diagram. However it doesn't match completely with the guides contained within the file 'OpsMgr2007R2-RCDocs.zip'.

Therefore I have made a small overview about what documents are to be found in the zip-file and what they are all about.

First of all, the roadmap diagram:
(The highlighted boxes are the guides to be found in the zip-file.)

A small note: the 'Migration Guide' depicted in the diagram has another name in the zip-file: 'Upgrade Guide'.

These guides have self-explanatory names so they do not need further introduction.

The guides contained by the zip-file:
(The highlighted guides aren't depicted in the roadmap diagram)


So what are the highlighted guides all about?

The first guide 'OM2007_MP_OpsMgrR2.doc' writes about the SCOM MP for SCOM R2 RC itself.

The second guide 'OM2007_ReportTrouble.docx' writes about how to solve problems one can encounter when installing/running the reportfunctionality of SCOM.

The third guide 'OM2007_Usage.doc' is about how to use SCOM and is rather special. One could say on the first glance that it matches with the document 'Operations Guide' depicted in the roadmap diagram. But there are differences between both guides.

The 'Operations Guide'- depicted in the roadmap diagram - follows the 'Deployment Guide' in order of usage and teaches a SCOM Admin what to do after a Management Group has been deployed.

The guide 'OM2007_Usage.doc' provides information about how to use the SCOM Console to manage the monitored environment. This document contains examples about how to build different kinds of collection rules, how to create different kind of reports and so on, whereas the other guide doesn't go into that kind of detail.

But a keen reader will notice there is still one file left in the zip-file. It is not a Word-document but a html-file:
'OpsMgr2007SupportedConfigurations.htm'.

It is a very important file since it contains all the information about supported operating systems, hardware configurations, software requirements, installation combinations, and security configurations for SCOM 2007 R2 RC.