Tag: review

Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager: Administration Cookbook – Book Review

After reading Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook I’ve managed to read another book about System Center 2012 component from the same publishing company. In front of my eyes was Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager: Administration Cookbook.

Author of the book are Brian Mason and Greg Ramsey. Both are well respected System Center Configuration Manager specialists. The book follows the same style like the SCSM 2012 Cookbook so SCCM 2012 is introduced in series of mini guides (called by Packt Publishing practical recipes) that will show you how to do certain tasks in order to administer the System Center component. In fact the book is focused only in administering SCCM 2012 and the title infers that. If you expect to learn something about designing SCCM 2012 environment you should find another book. The book is divided in 8 chapters which cover only the basics of CM 2012. If you are looking for a book that will explain the architecture of CM 2012 than this book is not for you. This book is a more practical book and than theoretical. If you are looking for more theoretical information you can find it in Technet Library. In the book you will find step by step guides on administrative tasks in CM 2012. The length of the book is 208 pages but that is because there are not so many screenshots which is may be a good thing because that way the book drives you to try the software product while reading the book and test the mini guides. Even though I am reading and trying CM 2012 features for a long time I’ve managed to learn and try new things described in the book simply because Configuration Manager is a big product with a lot of features.

I can recommend this book to engineers who just start with Configuration Manager 2012 but of course before actually reading this book it is best to get to know the product by reading Technet Library. CM 2012 is the most well document System Center component of the family. I can also recommend this book to SCCM 2007 administrators who just start to learn about the new features of SCCM 2012.

If you think this is the right book you can find it in several stores:

You can know more about the book by clicking on the image below.

Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook – Book Review

Recently I had the opportunity to read the book Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager Cookbook. The authors of the books are Samuel Erskine, Steven Beaumont, Anders Asp, Dieter Gasser and Andreas Baumgarten and two of them are even MVPs which infers for the quality of the book.

The book is divided in 11 chapters. The chapters are structured in a way that when you read the book you will start from more beginners to more advanced information. In the book you will find description and practices examples for all the features of System Center Service Manager 2012. In fact the bigger part of the book contains mini guides on how to do certain tasks in order to administer and manage the product. These mini guides are so detailed and explained well that you can build your own test environment and implement the steps in the book while reading it. This is useful because the easiest way to learn a product is to interact with it, to find out how all its features works by testing them.

The audience of this book is mostly people who currently start using or plan implementation of System Center 2012 Service Manager. The book will be also suitable for people who know different parts of SCSM 2012 but do not know the full power of the product. Before actually reading the book I would suggest to prepare yourself with a little Technet material about SCSM 2012. The authors didn’t include any information that already exists over Internet, instead they’ve included links to it. This gives uniqueness to the book.

Because Service Manager is a big product almost all of the chapters describes the basics of every feature but the book manages to show what are the capabilities of these features if more advanced techniques are implemented. This is good because you when you want to achieve something more advanced you will know if it is achievable and where to look for additional information in order to achieve it.

I definitely recommend this book to engineers who just start with System Center 2012 Service Manager or to more advanced users of this component part of System Center 2012 family.

You can find the book in the following online stores:

 

Course 10750A: Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 – Overview

Last week I was on course 10750A: Monitoring and Operating a Private Cloud with System Center 2012. Even though I had took the exam to that course and I am MCSE: Private Cloud already it is always useful attending such course. The course includes all System Center 2012 components with exception of SCCM 2012 with focus on System Center 2012 Service Manager and System Center 2012 Operations Manager. I was surprised to found out that most of the lab time included exercises with SCSM 2012. This was surprise because when I was taking the exam for this course most of the questions were SCOM 2012 related. Even though focus is on SCSM and SCOM 2012 all the products are represented on basic level and the whole course is like an introduction to new versions of the components. Besides introducing the new versions the course will show you how you can integrate the components and leverage that integration which can be quite useful in real world scenario. For me the course was useful because of this. I didn’t learn something new for the product but I’ve managed to try new things in the labs. As a summary I would say the the course can be useful if you are specialist in one of the components and you want to learn more about the other components and how to integrate them. If you are looking to learn advanced stuff for any of the components this course is not for you. You can always advance in your knowledge on any of the System Center components by reading articles from MVPs over Internet or by reading books for example like this one for SCOM 2012.