Hi,
I'm Jeremy Chapman and I try to make the lives of IT staff and management easier by creating free Solution Accelerator tools and guidance for challenging IT projects and services. We’ve just released the another piece in a great lineup of Solution Accelerator offerings for Windows Vista, the Windows Vista Service Life-Cycle Management guide. It is designed to help reduce costs, simplify service planning and implementation, and improve overall manageability of desktop service and support. This is the newest addition to our Windows Vista accelerators, including the Windows Vista Hardware Assessment, Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) 2007, Windows Vista Security Guide and the Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs.
In my consulting days before joining Microsoft, I used to help companies achieve International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certifications and what I always preferred was seeing actual service and management recommendations and sample deliverables required to achieve the certification, as opposed to a list of requirements. This guide is great because it makes all the concepts you read about in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and ISO real for your daily operations. Instead of just describing theories about how things ought to be run, it gives you implementer guidance according to roles in the IT department and gives you samples to use (see below) like an editable service map, daily/weekly/monthly activity logs, a service level agreement and partner underpinning contracts. Granted, this guide is written with larger organizations in mind, but if your company is looking to map out its services – even beyond the desktop service – or to start standardizing operations, this guide is short enough for IT departments of all sizes to get a lot of value and the sample docs can be modified or personalized easily to fit your needs.
Service map:
Service level agreement:
Operations calendar:
You can start to adopt the recommendations and customize the samples in no time and give your organizations the benefits of best practices to help further reduce the TCO of Windows Vista environments. Read this guide on Microsoft TechNet or download it for the extra samples and document templates on the Microsoft Download Center.
Windows Vista Service Life-Cycle Management rounds out our Solution Accelerator content for Windows Vista. Now whether you are evaluating required hardware upgrades, planning and executing large scale deployment projects or standardizing new user provisioning, determining security and configuration policies or developing a service strategy for ongoing management of Windows Vista desktop infrastructures, we have content and tools to help. Check out the Solution Accelerators website for more details.
-Jeremy