I really liked the feature added in OpsMgr 2007 R2 that lets you download and import new management packs directly from Microsoft’s catalog web service:
But later I started going back to the old way of downloading the management packs separately, since this also gets the documentation (usually in Microsoft Word format). No doubt that downloading management packs directly is convenient, but it encourages “bad” behavior to import management packs without reading the documentation first. Some management packs have additional functionality that is disabled by default, and some require additional configuration to your environment before the management pack is imported. If you skip the manual configuration, you might get false alerts or might not get all of the alerts that you need.
Recently while downloading management packs for a new server, I accidentally clicked on something that launched the guide in Microsoft Word. After some experimenting it turns out you can hover the mouse over the blank "Information" column, and when the cursor turns into a hand you can click there and open up the guide in Word. I’m not sure why that column is blank, but this should save some time and hassle of finding the documentation separately.
