"We announced DSI three years ago, and since then, we've kept on driving forward and filling in the blanks," Muglia said.

System Center competes with product suites such as Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView, IBM's Tivoli and CA Inc.'s Unicenter. At last week's conference, Microsoft announced Service Desk 2007, a help desk application that currently is in beta testing. It also showed off features that will be in the upcoming Version 4 of SMS, including support for Microsoft's Network Access Protection technology.

The NAP tools will be able to check PCs running Windows Vista to see if they have the latest security updates. If not, SMS will prevent them from accessing a corporate network until the required updates are installed and will notify users about their status via pop-up messages.

"You can patch all day, but what happens when a user logs in before getting the latest updates?" said Bryan Henson, a senior systems engineer at Pioneer Natural Resources Co. in Irving, Texas. The oil and gas company uses SMS 2003 to manage 1,600 PCs and 400 servers worldwide. Henson said NAP is a feature that Pioneer "had been asking Microsoft for for a long time."

Service Desk 2007 will give help desk staffers a single view for tracking trouble tickets. "The first version won't have all the cool features you'll want, but I think the product will be good enough that I'd give a serious look at the beta," said Dan Twing, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo.