For midsize to large companies, managing networks of Windows 2000-based systems should grow easier with the scheduled releases of two upcoming products.

Microsoft Corp. next week plans to make available a Windows 2000 version of its Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) software, a move that's due to be followed next month by the shipment of Version 4.1 of Tivoli Systems Inc.'s change configuration management tools for the Microsoft operating system.

"There's a lot of commonality of purpose between the two [management products]," said Patrick Dryden, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. "MOM is oriented toward the tasks of operations management. It scales to handle events for thousands of servers, but it's a dumb consolidation."

The Tivoli tools "add intelligence for managing Windows systems," Dryden said. To do so, he said, "they rely on functionality Microsoft has built into the operating system and build functionality onto that," such as an event simulation engine.

MOM 2000 will advance the use of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for Windows 2000 networks, a common structure on which software packages from different vendors can be managed, said Winston Bumpus, president of the Portland, Ore.-based Distributed Management Task Force, the industry group that developed the standard.

The Microsoft tool is based on management software licensed from NetIQ Corp. in San Jose and is said by the company to support the full range of its server-level products, including Microsoft Active Directory, the SQL Server database and the Internet Information Services software that manages Web servers.

The new version of Tivoli's change management products - which include inventory management, software distribution and workload tools - requires the Tivoli Enterprise Console framework and supports the Common Information Model standard, said a spokesman for the Austin, Texas-based unit of IBM.

Tight integration with existing tools is important to James A. Ghericich, senior technical officer at The Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. Tivoli's new software "will automatically bring in information from the Tivoli Event Manager, something I have to do manually now," he said. "And it has hooks into WMI to let me use Microsoft's internal methods of managing the operating system."

» posted by ITworld staff

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