Remember last year when Microsoft changed its licensing model for System Center as a whole? Evidently, things are still not quite as clear as we thought. I know our user group had Microsoft folks tell us that if you had CM07 with SA, that you would now own the System Center Suite. And the suite included CM, SCOM, SCORCH, etc.

But it's not as simple as that.

Microsoft put out some pretty detailed information like this link:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/7/0/870B5D9B-ACF1-4192-BD0A-543AF551B7AE/System_Center_2012_Licensing_FAQ.pdf

Key to this document was that it really made clear how much easier it was to license servers managed by CM. It's what they call Server Management License (ML). And it entitles you to run SCOM to monitor your CM servers, for example (no licenses are needed beyond the one for the server SCOM would run on.)

What is rather gray here is how you can use SCOM to monitor your CM servers without issue, but you cannot use SCORCH so easily. I'm now being told that a license for SCORCH (via the SC Client Management Suite or the Enterprise CAL) is required for any desktop being managed indirectly via SCORCH's orchestration.

To be precise, SCORCH cannot be used to directly touch a PC - this makes sense just like SCOM licensing does (you'd expect to have to pay to use SCOM to directly manage PC services, for example). But Microsoft is making a new point that I've never heard of before regarding an indirect touch of desktops. They're now saying that because CM manages desktops, that we're indirectly talking to clients and are still responsible to pony up for an a license for all desktops in the CM database.

Examples of SCORCH use and licensing:

• Optimize some SQL tables in CM, or to pull back a list of machines (even workstations) for reporting. This would be considered distant enough of a use of SCORCH to not require additional licensing.
• Approve software in CM (recall the Application Approval Workflow?) or use SCORCH to add workstations to a collection. This would require additional licensing.

I know this new wrinkle could suddenly make any SCORCH work you've done so far put you on the hook for a lot of money.

If it helps, there will be a licensing session at MMS this year.

http://www.2013mms.com/topic/details/MMS105

If you have any doubts about where you stand on this, I highly recommend you make this session.

Thanks again to JD Rickard for his session on navigating politics in the workplace. As soon as I get his slide deck, I'll post it. There were great takeaways. I saw Joey taking lots of notes (maybe he too could share them to be posted here. What stood out to me was that we should aim to accept only meetings that have agendas, notes taken, and tasks as an outcome. That's good advice to keep us from burning time or arguing about what was once said.

Merry Christmas, MNSCUG!

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In our October meeting, I talked about elections and "the board."

For years, now, there has been a group of us who find speakers, schedule them, arrange sponsorship, maintain the website, and send out the newsletters. That group has had members come and go and is currently made up of 8 of us. I guess we can just call it "the board." We've also had a president and VP each year as well. The president of the group should lead the board and the VP should fill in. We've generally frowned upon reelection to those positions, because we want to get more involvement from group members and the payoff last year was getting Steve Jesok to become very involved with the group and even presenting a couple times.

So how do you get on the board should you wish to help out? Just use the contact form on this site. How do you run for president or VP? Use the same contact form. We were hoping to be able to do an online election before our November meeting for president and VP. We'd love to have anyone step up and throw their hat in the ring. I'll set a deadline now for November 1st to get your name in and we'll start voting until the next meeting. Don't worry about "being good enough" to run. We'll help you out. What we need is people to dedicate a little bit of time.

As for the rest of what happened at the October meeting, we enjoyed food from Big Bowl, beer, and Ed Aldrich talking about how the unification of 1E tools work to get Win7 out fast & easy with no extra staff. Thanks to Monica Shah-Davidson from 1E for sponsoring us again!

And finally, next meeting will be November 15th (meet & greet at 4:30, meeting to start at 5) - details and registration forthcoming. JD. Rickard will tell us how to navigate the world of politics and managers, etc. We'll do a round table discussion for the 2nd half of the meeting. It should be a fun session to close out the year.