14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is allowing early adopters to test the next generation of System Center Operations Manager in a new way.
The company is currently accepting enrollment applications for the new System Center Operations Manager 2012 Community Evaluation Program.
Customers looking not just to test drive a pre-release Build of System Center Operations Manager 2012, but also for additional insight into the evolution that this solution will introduce, need to head over to Microsoft Connect, and apply to participate in the CEP.
“Starting around the time of public-beta, the OM12 CEP will offer private and focused topic discussions, whereby the entire enrolled community will all look at one key feature/enhancement at a time,” revealed Jason Buffington, senior technical product manager – System Center.
“ This will give you, as enrolled participants, not only in-depth insight to the new OM12 features, but also access to the community of SMEs who can help you get the most out of Operations Manager 2012 (and 2007 R2 in some cases).”
Buffington explained that the software giant plans to kick off the community reach-outs as Operations Manager 2012 will get closer to the public Beta development milestone.
For the time being, the Redmond company is only accepting CEP participant requests, which it will review. Testers will get additional details, as well as the OM12 topic schedule, and information on the CEP discussion forums by the end of June, 2011.
“We’ll start off looking at some of the features that you have heard a lot about so far, such as Network Monitoring or Application Monitoring. Then, we’ll dig into some of the new topology changes, as well as upgrade scenarios, and then just keep looking at different facets of OpsMgr 2012 moving forward,” Buffington added.
With the Community Evaluation Program (CEP), Microsoft is trying to reach as many customers as possible, providing early adopters with an in-depth experience for System Center Operations Manager 2012, but also for more solutions.
“Essentially, a CEP is an organized way of bringing our subject matter experts (SMEs) from our product teams, our community (like MVPs and experienced users) and those interested in taking a deep look at our v.Next software for evaluation and preparation for deployment purposes,” Buffington explained.