Q: How can I see the different benefits the Microsoft solutions bring to each other?
A. Although each Microsoft product has its own capabilities, often the different Microsoft products actually bring additional value when used together. There are some very obvious value statements, like "System Center Operations Manager monitors most of the Microsoft products" but there are some lesser-known benefits; for example:
- Microsoft Lync brings automatic presence and live communications capabilities to System Center Service Manager just by having the Lync client installed on the same machine as the Service Manager console.
- Operations Manager provides System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) with a unified console for multi-DPM-instance management.
- SQL Server Enterprise Edition brings additional analysis and reporting capabilities to several other products.
To make this more understandable, I actually created my first Windows 8 application, Microsoft Better Together, which also shows basic information on each product. You can download and install it from the from the Windows Store. If you're interested in the evolution of this app, I wrote up some information about it on my blog.
I do have a request to ask of you. I'm sure I'm missing benefits between some products, so if you think there are benefits I'm missing, please let me know so I can update the application and make it even better for everyone. Below are some screen shots of the main screen and an example of the product-specific pages.
