Vista Service Life-Cycle Management

Windows Vista was advertised from the start as one aspect of the equation to reduce the total cost of ownership for corporate infrastructures including Microsoft's latest operating system. But the platform in itself won't bring down the TCO in desktop deployment scenarios. This is why Microsoft is delivering adjacent solutions such as the Windows Vista Service Life-Cycle Management. Essentially, the Solution Accelerator is designed to enable the creation and implementation of "best practice service life-cycle management of Windows Vista desktop infrastructures". Responsible for putting together the Windows Vista Service Life-Cycle Management is the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). Jason Osborne, Frameworks PM, revealed that the Vista Service Life-Cycle Management is just one example of the work to come from MOF and that professionals should expect similar offerings.

"This year, our team is going to be doing a significant overhaul to the core MOF IP. For our initial release, we will be focusing on the infrastructure lifecycle, IT Governance, and the activities of the IT pro. As part of this, we will also be revisiting the existing Process Model to reformat, sort, add, and remove SMFs as needed. As we work through the Process Model, we will also be identifying requirements and dependencies between the Process Model and the Team Model to prepare it for a new release as well," Osborne stated.

Solutions Accelerators are built as a collection of best-practices harvested from a wide audience, Microsoft aiming to guarantee in this manner the fact that the offerings will tailor fit an extensive range of scenarios. "As we've been defining our requirements for the MOF Update, we've been looking at three core groups as the consumer of our framework: the IT Pro; the IT Strategist (or Manager, or Service Manager) and the CxO. Now obviously, at this point we're covering a rather broad spectrum of the IT populace and I don't want to suggest that we'll be trying to address each group equally with our deliverables. Yet there is a reason to address content to each level", Osborne added.