Event Manager provides scheduling, alerting and response features for optimizing schedule performance in SQL Server 2005. While SQL Server 2005 is a major advance in many areas, it does not offer much more than SQL Server 2000 in terms of new features for managing scheduled events and notifications. One big change with SQL Server 2005 is that users can create "shared schedules," which actually increases the likelihood of scheduling collisions. This is an issue Event Manager handles by highlighting the collisions on the calendar and allowing the DBA to resolve them via a quick drag-and-drop.
 

Migrating to SQL Server 2005?
A SQL Server 2005 upgrade can be a major task and Event Manager can greatly reduce the effort required, especially when it comes to the setup of alerting. While the notification system has been improved in SQL Server 2005, you still cannot manage notifications globally across all servers nor do you have the robust conditions and actions provided through Event Manager. SQL Server 2005's new SMTP-based "Database Mail" addresses the reliability issues of SQL Mail, but Database Mail requires roughly the same level of configuration as MAPI & SQL Mail. The user is required to touch every server and every job on every server to configure it. With Event Manager you can configure notifications across all SQL Servers at one time and from one place.