Author

An author (also commonly named a developer) is a person developing Management Pack to allow SCOM to monitor applications and services, during a process called authoring.

Profiles
Authors can work for different companies and in different capacities.
 * A developer working for a software publisher or a company selling hardware products and offering the official Management Pack for their solutions. Example: Microsoft Exchange 2013 MP by Microsoft, or HP Servers MP by HP.
 * A developer working for a 3rd party company licensing Management Packs monitoring applications of other companies. Example: Apache HTTP Server Management Pack by Bridgeways or Blackberry MP by NiCE.
 * A person working in their spare time to develop a Management Pack monitoring an application or a service and sharing it with the community. Example: xSNMP on CodePlex.
 * A developer working for an organization using a SCOM platform to monitor its in-house application. Example: A financial company developing a Management Pack to monitor its business critical application.

Responsibilities
An author would work with Management Pack in different contexts.
 * Developing a new Management Pack from scratch to monitor an application or a service for which there is no monitoring existing or deemed acceptable.
 * Modifying an existing Management Pack to implement updates, new features or fixes.

User Role
In a Management Group, Author is the name of a formal User Role found in the Operations Console under the Administration pane. It grants permissions to its member to open and interact with the Authoring pane of the Operations Console.

Typically authors have permissions to modify any element displayed in the Authoring workspace (Monitor, Rule, Discovery) and to create override modifying the standard behavior of existing elements.

Tools
Different solutions are available to work with Management Pack. Each one providing different levels of complexity, capabilities and easiness of use.