The morning keynote announced some nifty things mostly related to making IT work in general less burdensome. Some really cute scenes were played out between fictional an ‘IT Professional’ and an ‘Information worker’, showing the things we all know: IT is overworked, never has enough time and the employees are constantly stacking projects on top of an already endless list of things to do. Nifty things: client inspection and isolation, intregrate everything from the ground up, build it all on a foundation of .Net, etc. Some new tools were announced/demoed: Best Practices Analyzer tools for SQL Server (and others are coming), SMS will get more tightly integrated patch management, lots of nifty features in the soon to be released ISA Server 2004. And, last but certainly least, every attendee gets a free copy of SMS 2003, Windows Services for Unix and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005. The speaker mentioned this was nearly $10 million dollars in software licenses….

The session after that was Windows Update Services (WUS), the new name for Software Update Services (SUS) 2.0. Lots of neat features, all web managed: date based deadlines, scan for needed updates and quite an array of reporting capabilty. And the speaker pointed out that SMS is still needed in large environments, but WUS should handle smaller shops well. Still no support for NT4, but does anyone really expect that?

After lunch: Visual Studio 2005 Software Project Management. Hopefully, work item tracking and source control will both get demoed.