At TechEd, Microsoft announced the beta of System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2.  The cross platform extensions component will be open source for the 1st time and will be automatically included in R2.  Here’s a list of topics:

• What new things you can do in R2
• Management of Linux / Unix operating systems and applications
• Service Level Monitoring capabilities
• Explanation of why people should be confident Microsoft can do cross-platform management

The beta will be available end of November 2008, RTM is scheduled for the 1st half of calendar year 2009

SCOM 2007 R2 goes open source