This section provides additional detail about core System Center Operations Manager 2007 features used in the Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.5 infrastructure.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 provides end-to-end service management that is easy to customize and extend to help improve service levels across your IT environment. End-to-end service management:

• Integrates application, client, server, and synthetic transaction monitoring in a single end-to-end solution.
  
• Manages business-critical services such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, and Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services.
  
• Manages a wide range of Line of Business applications that use Microsoft Windows ServerT, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft .NET Framework, and Internet Information Services (IIS), as technology building blocks.
  
• New service-oriented views and availability reporting enable both the operations team and IT management to get the information they need to quickly identify and resolve issues that affect service levels.
  
• Microsoft partners provide specialized management packs and service templates that provide the knowledge to extend Operations Manager service monitoring capabilities to third-party infrastructure and applications such as Oracle, Apache, SAP, UNIX, and Linux platforms and network infrastructure.
  
• Integrates with existing management tools through the Operations Manager Connector Framework and bi-directional partner connector solutions.
  

System Center Operations Manager 2007 is best of breed for Windows because it includes expertise from the Microsoft Server, Client, and Application teams. This provides you with knowledge and capabilities to drive better efficiency.

• Includes management packs with prescriptive knowledge and automated in line tasks created by the application and operating systems development teams and verified in real-world production deployments to improve monitoring, troubleshooting, and problem resolution for more than 50 Microsoft applications and Windows Server components.
  
• Provides proactive problem management and troubleshooting of client computers running Windows to accelerate the identification and resolution of end-user problems.
  
• Helps reduce the cost of compliance auditing and improve the efficiency of your IT environment through an audit collection service.
  

System Center Operations Manager automates routine, redundant tasks, and provides intelligent reporting and monitoring to help increase efficiency and enable greater control of your IT environment.

• Maximizes use of Active Directory and the Windows operating system for easy system discovery and more secure, automated remote deployment of agents that automatically connect to management servers to deploy the available and appropriate management policies.
  
• Includes rich new reports and easy to customize reporting environment, bringing additional insight to troubleshooting and planning.
  
• Builds on Windows PowerShellT and provides an SDK that enables secure scripted automation across the Operations Manager environment.
  
• Scales to support organizations with hundreds of IT operations users, tens of thousands of managed servers, and hundreds of thousands of managed clients via highly scalable Management Servers that can be tiered to provide consolidated views of the whole enterprise.
  
• Minimizes false alarms by introducing self tuning monitoring thresholds that "learn" and adjust alerting behavior to the typical business usage patterns of applications and systems.
  

Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.5 uses management packs to monitor the corresponding services and servers based on System Center Operations Manager 2007. In addition to its own management pack, Hosted Messaging and Collaboration leverages the management packs of Exchange 2007, SQL Server 2005, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and Active Directory from the corresponding product teams. Service Providers can manage and monitor the corresponding products through the Operations Manager Console. The management packs of Exchange 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are used by Hosted Messaging and Collaboration services availability monitoring and reporting, which are defined in the Service Availability Monitoring section.

Hosted Messaging and Collaboration version 4.5 has its own management pack. It is based on the original MPS Management Pack and added unit monitors to monitor the data usage status for the following components:

1. System Center Operations Manager
   
2. Active Directory
   
3. Exchange
   
4. Windows SharePoint Services