Microsoft today released the first beta of the successor of System Center Opalis, now called System Center Orchestrator 2012. Opalis Software was acquired by Microsoft in December 2009, and Microsoft decided to integrate the solutions into its System Center portfolio.
System Center Orchestrator (SCO) is Run Book Automation (RBA) software, which can be used to define, build, orchestrate, manage and report on workflows. The workflows are defined in the SCO workflow designer, and so called Integration Packs are provided to interact with Microsoft and non-Microsoft products, which run on so called Action Servers.
The details on what to expect in the beta were already outlined by Microsoft in March this year and covered by virtualization.info. Microsoft decided to integrate the Opalis code into the Microsoft codebase, and to drop support for running the Opalis DB on Oracle. The new console will be based on Internet Information Services and Silverlight.
The Beta can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center.