April, 2012

One of the features in Orchestrator is “Variables”. These are globally-available, statically-defined values (hence the running joke that they’re not actually “variables”, they’re “constants”). They provide a good way to define values that you re-use over...

Using the “Initialize Data” activity at the beginning of a runbook allows you to provide input parameters to any runbook. This greatly enhances the flexibility of a runbook by allowing it to be called by another runbook or via the web service, and the...

One of the cool things about Orchestrator is that it can automatically handle multiple-instance threading of runbooks or queue them up depending on your need. For instance, you may have a runbook that processes new users to be added to Active Directory...

One of the threads I’ve seen going around the Orchestrator discussion list recently is how to run the Runbook Tester as another user. The Runbook Tester is launched from the Runbook Designer and automatically loads the runbook currently being edited....

I see a lot of requests from people creating integrations with Orchestrator to get information about some of the inner workings of an installation, beyond what’s available via the web service. The web service allows you to retrieve information about:...

A couple of weeks ago, Karl Prosser posted an interesting article on using PowerShell v3 with Orchestrator .And, while at MMS last week, I had an opportunity to sit down and run through one of the PowerShell v3 hands-on labs that were available. In that...

I recently saw a new feature suggestion in the Orchestrator feedback on Connect and I realized that we can actually accomplish the requested functionality today in Orchestrator, so I thought I’d share how. Here is the feedback from the customer: There...

I was looking through the new articles over on our TechNet Wiki and came across this one that I thought you might find helpful. This one was written by Microsoft’s own Anil Erduran and in it he talks about Smart Links and link conditions in System Center...

One of the first questions people have when they start writing custom Orchestrator activities using the SDK is “How do I step through my code?”. After all, activities are not executables, they’re just classes. And, it’s not until the classes are packaged...

Yesterday, I wrote about how to debug a custom activity using Visual Studio . Today I’m going to show you how to add an item to the Options Menu so that you can have a reusable configuration setting that can be used across multiple activities in an IP...

In the last post , I showed how to create a configuration for an activity that shows up in the options menu. I also showed how you can use that configuration setting to modify the actions of the activity at runtime. In this post, I’ll show you how to...

While at MMS last week, it was apparent that many people were still finding out about Orchestrator. One of the most common comments I heard was something like “I really think Orchestrator is cool, but I already have a Service Manager-like tool in place...