Last week a the It Forum in Barcelona I met Gordon McKenna, he is an It Professional specialised in Windows Managment in the UK. He is about to launch a Windows Management Website in the UK in a few monhs. Untill then he can report on Bink.nu, this is an interview he had last week, thanks Gordon!

Gordon caught up with Kelly Altom after a presentation Kelly is the Microsoft Group Program Manager for MOM. Gordon asked him a few questions regarding his team and their main goals with V3.

Hi Kelly, and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed,

To start with can you tell us a little about your responsibilities within the MOM team?

KA: I am responsible for MOM, what it does do and what it doesn’t do,
Inside a product team there is a group manager a test manager and a development manager.

Being someone who has worked with MOM customers for a long period of time it is so great to see so many commonly asked customer features in the product?

KA: A lot of feedback has gone into the development of the product, now we feel that the product is the way the market needs it to be and where customers want it to be.

So a lot of your time is spent speaking with customers and getting there opinions?

KA: I spend a lot of time and I have people whose entire job is nothing but speaking to customers, then I have other people who spend all their time working with developers making sure that what the customers want the developers end up making it that way.

Do you want to maybe, tell me a little about the team you’ve got working with you?

KA: Well the team has been together a while so they work really well together, and they are a good group of guys.

Meeting a few of the MOM product team here and seeing some of the sessions they have done one thing that comes across is that they are a really enthusiastic team of guys.

KA: Yes they certainly all love this area

This is great from my point of view as management has always really been seen as the boring discipline in IT and I think MOM is really helping to change that, in particular at this event management as been the key area that people have been talking about.

KA: It is the talk of the show.

What would you say have been the main drivers for your team in the development of the new version of MOM

KA: It has really been customer focus. Customer focus design is what we talk about all the time. Our customers are really important to us. We have our Technology Adaption Program, our TAP program, we go to these customers over and over again to make sure what we are doing is what they want, we fly them all to Redmond to try out our product before we release it to beta, to tell us what is good and what is not good so it is really customer focus design.

I’ve seen Bob Muglia's keynote earlier in the week and he spoke about how there is always a need to balance customer needs with innovation.

KA: Yes, and so where we do the innovation part is we dream up areas where we think we want to work on, then we create mock ups and scenarios to explain those areas, thats the innovative part, then we bring those say 20 areas to our customers and say is this something you may want, please rank them and tell them what is most important to you, so there is innovation but it really has to do with how well we explain what we have in mind, and once you explain this well then it is easy for our customers to say I love that or I don’t need that at all.
So it is still innovative but customer focused.

So is there a lot of stuff that hits the cutting room floor?

KA: You have to have good mock ups that really explain what you have in mind, you have to explain this well, a good mock up of a visual UI for example with good scenarios on how you would use, and then they really understand how it could be used.

I have met a lot of customers this week still on MOM 2000 who have had concerns about support for the older platforms as we move towards the next version, could you comment on this.

KA: All our products at Microsoft have a 10 year support lifecycle, and as far as we know right now that what it will be for MOM 2000, anything after that is unkown at this time.

And what about whether there will be an upgrade path from MOM 2000 to V3

KA: No, there is actually no upgrade path at all, and again this is where we went to our customers and asked will you upgrade in place or would you run a paralell system and migrate and all of them said they dont upgrade in place they migrate.
So for V3 you run a paralell system and then you switch everything over to it.
The one migration we do have is that we will allow customers to convert all management packs, so every management pack for 2005 will be converted to an XML based management pack.

My experience has been that the parallel upgrade has always been a better and cleaner option

KA: Operations people are conservative people, quite often their job is on the line so they want to perfrom a paralell upgrade

Also from what I have seen with the new service orientated model with V3, it looks a very different architecture and a different way of monitoring from previous versions, so it will most likely take a different approach when deploying and configuring

KA: It is going to require that Operations and development talk to each other, if you have a line of business application that is in production now and you want to monitor it as a service you need help from the developers whop wrote it to tell you what to monitor and what components need to be looked at.

Would you say know that developers of applications both in-house and third party should be looking to see how they could incorporate the SDM model in their designs.

KA: They should use Visual Studio and with Visual Studio they should model their applcations Health model, and that health model can be consumed by MOM, and that will be the basis of the management pack, its not a complete story yet but it will be in the future.

Thats a good message.

What are you teams plans for the coming months?

KA: We are busy working with partners, and are working on a partner ready SDK, we are also very excited about the launch at the end of 2006 and will be working towards this over the coming months.

Gordon McKenna
MOM – MVP (UK)
gordon@inframon.com

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