Last week I posted about using a PowerShell script to automate VM cluster maintenance , and talked about how the VMM PowerShell snap-in is 64-bit, while Opalis is 32-bit (and therefore runs PowerShell in 32-bit mode). I thought I would take a second and create a separate post on this to call this out specifically because it's important, it's already being asked about, and will likely be a source of confusion unless you know about it before you try it. If you're running Opalis on a 64-bit OS like...

I don't know how I manage to find myself doing things that are "out of the ordinary" so often. Maybe it's just in my nature to want to tweak things so that they're "just right" or provide the exact user experience I'm looking for, rather than settling for less elegant ways of doing them. Maybe it's just my unique combination of A.D.D. and perfectionism that fuels this behavior, but in most cases, it leads me to finding new ways to do things or simply leads me to do things that aren't documented well...

In the Getting Started with the Configuration Manager IP article, I talked about the basic scenarios we thought about when creating the Configuration Manager Integration Pack. Now it's time to go deeper and address some specific datacenter scenarios in detail. One of the things we hear from customers is that although ConfigMgr makes it a lot easier to patch computers through the use of WSUS and the Software Updates Management features, and ConfigMgr lets you assign maintenance windows to avoid taking...

You shouldn’t be shocked to discover that System Center Service Manager has a CMDB. A CMDB is at the beating heart of any Service Desk solution… a very basic definition of Change Management is the process which maintains the CMDB. Service Manager provides for various ways one can build an initial set of data in the CMDB and maintain this information over time as part of standard IT processes. This includes connectors between Service Manager and Configuration Manager, Operations Manager...

Opalis 6.3 introduces four new System Center Integration Packs (for SCCM, SCSM, SCVMM, and SCDPM) and updates the existing OpsMgr IP. We'll be posting a number of deep dives into the different Integration Packs to show some of the scenarios we used in creating them, but I thought that for Configuration Manager I would add a "Getting Started" article to walk through all of the different activities and how to quickly build useful workflows with them. What's In the Configuration Manager IP...

It’s only natural that a new Service Desk solution should have to interoperate with an existing Service Desk solution. The reason for this should be pretty obvious: Everyone in IT uses the Service Desk pretty much every day. So migrating is bound to present certain challenges as a new, modern system is built out and the older legacy system is spun down. The traditional approach of addressing this change has been to build out the new system and then gradually migrate users off of the old...

Jeffrey Fanjoy has just uploaded an Opalis Integration Pack for SharePoint to the Opalis Community Project on CodePlex The Integration Pack for Microsoft SharePoint enables you to manipulate SharePoint Lists and Libraries (e.g. Document Libraries, Image Libraries etc.) to add, modify and remove entries, files and attachments. This Integration Pack adds the following objects to Opalis Integration Server: • Create List Item • Delete Attachment • Delete Document • Delete List Item • Download Attachment...